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Farewell Be

From all that I have heard and read from random stories on the web the guy that owned BE did pull some stupid stuff when dealing with Apple. He was really arrogant from what I gather, and was asking for crazy money.

I did use BE OS a few times and was always amazed at it. If it could have gotten shipped by Compaq or Dell, histroy would be VERY different. It just never had that killer app it needed to push it over the edge.
 
Originally posted by pc_convert?
But the most amazing thing is Apple didn't by Be's assets. Palm picked the rements of Be up for 11million. This sort of money is chump change to apple.
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I don't remeber the number, but when Apple was shopping, Gasse was asking for hundreds of millions of dollars. Sure NeXT was $400 million, but you got a lot more - not the least of which was Steve Jobs.
Apple could have hybridised NEXT and BeOS, so OSX would be as beautiful as it is now, but with shear performance of Be.
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Interesting idea - but I doubt it would be that easy. OS X is not really that slow - Aqua is. But Aqua is doing a whole heck of a lot more than any other OS's window manager is doing. It's too bad they had to convert from OPENSTEP's Display PostScript engine. That thing was heavily optimized and fast - even on the old NextStation Colors with 68040's. If you look at the performance of non-gui activities, like Final Cut Pro rendering or iDVD or even the RC5 distributed.net client, you see very little degridation in speed on the same machine from OS 9. (There is some, but that's pre-emptive multitasking for you, not a bad trade-off if you ask me)
If you don't have BeOS and have an older Mac not a (G3 or G4), just try it. It can be picked up for next to nothing now and you will think you own a 1Ghz G4!
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Well, a 1Ghz G4 with no app's!;)
 
BeOS on Virtual PC

I'm downloading the BeOS 5 Personal Edition now. I will then try to install it on Windows 98 with Virtual PC 5 on Mac OS X - now that's a load (I've got 640MB or ram so hopefully it won't be too bad).

I might have to try to install BeOS on my old PC. It sounds like an amazing OS. If only Mac OS X was as fast as Be. Do you think 10.2 will increase speeds?

What big software was there for Be? Anything at all? Wasn't Netscape made for Be, or am I thinking of Unix.

**
On the side, have you ever noticed how fast browsing with IE on Windows is compared to IE on Mac OS X? It's soo much faster. My school's PC is 350 MHz, 128MB with cable internet. It's about 3x faster than my G4 733MHz, 640MB, and cable. It's very sad...I wish Microsoft fixes IE, it's extremely buggy too.
 
IE Speed

I'm no MicroSoft basher but making IE fast on Windows can't be to hard when your app' developers have intimate knowledge of the OS. They aren't kidding when they say IE is "part of the OS".

What IS sad is how buggy IE 5.x is on Win 2K. Lot's of sites paint crap all over the window while scrolling. My company doesn't support IE 6 yet so I can't speak to it's buggieness.

On another note, I just downloaded the latest Mozilla for Win32 and it is damn good! A few little bugs but it is fast and clean looking! An OS X native version is coming, hopefully soon! (And, hopefully it will run as fast)
 
Does anybody know whats going on with Amiga OS? I used to really like Atari and not like Amiga.

I would love to see what the Amiga OS is like!

Ensign
 
Originally posted by Ensign Paris
Does anybody know whats going on with Amiga OS? I used to really like Atari and not like Amiga.

I would love to see what the Amiga OS is like!

Ensign
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http://www.amiga.com/3.9/
I like the system requirements:
* CD-ROM drive
* Hard drive
* 68020 or higher processor
* Amiga 3.1 ROMs (version 40.xx)
* 6 MB Fast RAM
 
Originally posted by Ensign Paris
Does anybody know whats going on with Amiga OS? I used to really like Atari and not like Amiga.

I would love to see what the Amiga OS is like!

Ensign
Click to expand...

I was also an Atari 520 ST fan / Amiga hater. Oddly, I had the first Amiga 1000 sold in Virginia in late '85 but sold it for a IIe. Not sure what I was thinking. After going ST for a while I came back to Amiga. I've had several.

Presently I've got a pretty nice Amiga 2000 (bought new, 2 years ago) and an Amiga 1200 that I've towered and added a 68060 50MHz to. Running AmigaDOS 3.9. Picture here:

http://www.blakespot.com/list/images/a1200_060.jpg

Eventually plan to add PCI busboard to it so I can get ethernet on there and stop using the SCSI Zip drive as a go-between from G4 to A1200.


blakespot
 
Be, Amiga and Atari

I was actually a registered Be developer. I can't even program in C! :) Anyway, as a result, I have some Be OS disks for the Mac sitting around.

I did buy Be OS 4.5.2 for the PC. I was really REALLY impressed with the speed on just a PII-266. I was also in contact with a Be OS employee who was famous in the Amiga world. He was impressed when I had Be OS running on a dual Athlon 1.2 Ghz. Sadly he was out of a job when Palm bought the Be OS. Apparently, you do not need video card driver developers for handheld applications. There goes the idea of Palm's continued development of Be OS for the desktop.

Anyway... I was a heavy Amiga user from `88 to about `94. There is a certain elegance to the Amiga that I think was lacking from the Atari ST. Did you know that the Atari ST OS was developed by Digital Research and is in real life called "CP/M 68K"? Of course it has the GEM desktop sitting on top of it.

I do have a 1040 ST system for sale on ebay at the moment. It's got a few hours left. Interesting machine, but I never used it. I was too into the Amiga, of which I have several sitting around here. I'm debating if I want to spend $40 on Amiga OS 3.9 and dive back into it. I'm getting to the point where I have too many computers, and not enough time to play with them all.

Scottgfx
G4-733 OS X is home for me! :)
 
Interesting. I had been unaware of any connection between CP/M 68K and the Atari ST. But there does seem to be one. The Atari ST was far less of a machine from a hardware perspective, than the Amiga. There were no custom chips in place to aid the CPU on the ST, which was designed in a mere 7-9 months in response to news of the Amiga's release.


blakespot
 
Be Software

Go to the following site to see what software and drivers can be found for BeOS:

http://www.bebits.com

The site is updated daily.

"What big software was there for Be? Anything at all? Wasn't Netscape made for Be, or am I thinking of Unix."

The biggest software for BeOS was from what I have are:

Gobe Productive - office application
Opera Browser - still available on their website
Adamation had a real time video editor - you can probably still find it out at fry's sitting behind boxes.
Mozilla - still being ported to BeOS.

I will miss the OS, used to use daily until about 3 months ago. I just hope that Palm sells off the parts of BeOS that it does not need or want.
 
Originally posted by blakespot
... the ST, which was designed in a mere 7-9 months in response to news of the Amiga's release.

blakespot
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Not exactly. It wasn't built in response to the news of the Amiga.

Jack Tramiel wanted to take it with him when he left Commodore. It was his "baby". They wouldn't let him.

So when he took over Atari, he built the ST. It wasn't a response after the announcement.
 
Atari-Amiga History

True, the Atari ST would not have exsisted had it not been for the Amiga. The Amiga started development in the early `80's as a game system. After the bottom dropped out of the game system market (around `82?) the development shifted toward the system being a personal computer. By around 83-84 the money dried up for the development going on at Amiga Inc. Amiga signed a deal with the devil. Atari (Perhaps after Jack Tramiel took over) loaned Amiga money to continue development and make payroll. The deal was that if Amiga couldn't pay them back by a certain time, Atari would takeover the Amiga technology that had been developed. (And do what with it?) The Amiga folks didn't want to be taken over by Atari, so they continued to shop themselves around. Commodore finally bit and the rest, as they say, is history. Well, Atari didn't like this one bit and both sued them and started the development of the ST. The ST actually beat the Amiga to market in `85. This caused Amiga some troubles. They had to release the Amiga OS before it was finished. Thus begat all of the lies about the Amiga being an unstable OS. Yes is was buggy when first released, but they fixed the problems pretty quick. And also, with all the bad blood between Commodore and Atari, there was a lot of misinformation passed around. I still have an article from around `89-89 that goes over the lies told about the Amiga and corrects them.

What's kind of neat is that there are still a couple of companies in Germany that are making ST clones!
 
I remember the bugs. I had AmigaDOS 1.0 on that original Amiga 1000 I got in the fall of '85. I stuck around for the 1.1 upgrade but strangely sold the Amiga as I was lured by Apple's adds for the IIe (I was a //c user before the Amiga) with the new UniDisk 3.5 and Catalyst, a desktop GUI that ran b&w in the 560x192 res of the //e's double-high-res screen. Odd, that move.

I did quite enjoy the Atari, and it was a nice step (back) up from that same IIe. But really nothing about it beat the Amiga. I recall FlightSim II was faster on the ST w/ its 8MHz 68000 vs. the Amiga with its 7.14MHz 68000 (FSII used no custom hardware on the Amiga). Still---I enjoyed my time with the ST. I ended up with a Mega2 ST later on, but that was a mistaken purchase.

I'd say, of all the machines I've owned, that the Amiga 2000 and my original Apple IIgs were the most fun.


blakespot
 
Originally posted by dantec
I don't mean to be rude, but I think that was posted on the Macrumors news page a while ago... That is good to see...
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Originally posted by eric_n_dfw
You're probably right - I found it via a Google search.
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FYI - I just read the two posts and Slashdot's was a day before MacRumors. :D
 
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