alberth
10 hours ago
I recall dual booting BeOS circa 1999/2000, on my 486dx2-66.
It was shockingly performant, especially with anything graphical.
The difficulty was no apps.
Brings back fond memories, nonetheless.
MomsAVoxell
5 hours ago
There were a few apps, a word processor, a 3D modeling and rendering application, some media players, a basic DAW and so on .. but the web browser situation kind of wasn’t so great, and there were still holes in the OS where future features had been promised, a bit too long imho ..
(Disclaimer: you can pry my still-functioning BeBox from my cold dead hands.. okay, I admit, I only use it a couple times a year just to be sure it still boots..)
JKCalhoun
9 minutes ago
I've been told that, circa 1996 or so, there were a lot of holes in the OS. It demoed well, but…
Related: I've been enjoying, the Designed in California podcast [1]. Link below is "Part 3" wherein Apple is circling the drain in the mid 1990's (when I started at Apple, BTW) and is desperately looking outside Apple for the operating system they hope will save the company. Be (and Jean-Louis Gassée) look like they will win:
ardenpm
3 hours ago
Reminds me I should probably make sure mine still boots, been a few years now.
Everytime I have to re-find all of the adapters for the keyboard, mouse and monitor. Always amazed how fast it boots when I do get it going.
majorchord
8 hours ago
I'm fairly certain that BeOS never supported the 486
nrr
5 hours ago
Specifically, the BeOS required support for the rtdsc instruction for its timing, and that was only available on the Pentium chips or later.
cosmic_cheese
8 hours ago
It was ridiculously fast on my family’s Dimension 4100 tower, which had a 750Mhz PIII in it. The 98SE install that machine shipped with was glacial in comparison, and though Win2K shrunken the gap dramatically it still wasn’t as fast as BeOS.
I was able to find a decent number of apps on BeBits but a lot of stuff was missing.
d3Xt3r
an hour ago
Was blazing fast even on my 450MHz PIII. But QNX was equally fast too on the same machine, if not faster. I think I enjoyed using QNX more at the time overall. Oh, and DOS too, late 90s/early 00s DOS was surprisingly decent with tons of cool thirdparty apps. There was even a quirky graphical web browser called Arachne that I thoroughly enjoyed using.
multiplegeorges
9 hours ago
It had a decent number of apps, I drove it as my primary OS for a while.
Ended up using Linux, but it was a great OS for its time.