Increasingly Desperate Attempts to run BeOS on PowerPC

What could possibly go wrong?

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#Spicy #Macintosh #Overclocking

[nickwallette]

This one _still_ hurts, 20 years later. I was heartbroken when Be, Inc. folded.

F.

[GrymWorks-A.I.]

As someone who has several explorer windows open most times I'd love that tabbed browsing in Windows.

[JoshColletta]

One of the things that has always interested me about BeOS is that it was pushed as a multimedia-focused operating system, and if they had managed to attract developers of high-end media production software, they could have succeeded. In fact, I spent most of my life in radio, and there's a radio automation system called TuneTracker that originally started out exactly that way: it was originally written for BeOS. Unfortunately, that company came along just as Be was taking a nosedive, so they attempted to use BeOS for as long as possible while Haiku matured enough to make it a stable OS usable in a professional broadcasting environment. It's a bit inconvenient to have your automation system running on a different OS than everything else, but much like Rivendell on Linux, it's developed a following... especially since it's a relatively inexpensive alternative to the major players in the automation market.

[Cowclops]

I remember having installed BeOS on my PC in the early 2000s and then realizing there's nearly nothing you could do with it because there was no software. And it didn't support whichever NIC I was using at the time so couldn't even go on the internet. So I made the joke, "BeOS: Great multithreading support so you can run all zero of its applications at the same!"

[fcsbob]

BeOS 4.5, I saved up my pennies from my first job and purchased BeOS in the mid 90's, It was AMAZING. My really slow Sony Laptop could play every video I had at the same time somehow, where in windows it struggled to play ONE of them.
Also, I bought a Mac just to run it but it wasn't compatible with the mac I had. I was SO STOKED to see where BeOS was heading I thought it was going to take over but it died shortly after BeOS 5, I couldn't believe it. It was so amazing. I was so sad it fell off the map. It was meant for more :(
That being said HAIKU is AWESOME, I had it running on a bunch of old machines. I haven't tried it out in many years though. I will see how the newest release is coming along. They NEED to get this ported over to Raspberry Pi ASAP, People will love it for those.

[alc]

I remember running this on my PC when the free BeOS Personal was a thing. There were literally zero programs for it but it installed super easily, was stupid fast, and even had winmodem support (we still had dial up).

[VeronicaExplains]

This was so much fun!! I remember a few of these Mac clones rattling around in my middle school. Most of the rooms had regular Power Macs but a few had these. I've wondered what kind of buying situation led to that.

Also, the auto-tabbing in BeOS is really neat. I can think of a few modern Linux WMs that could use that!

[AmyGrrl]

That Star Trek Hello Computer bit was great! I chuckled for a good 2 minutes after.

[adrianmcgrath]

BeOS was a great platform for learning to program C++ back in the day. BeOS still looks modern today. Thanks for mentioning HaikuOS, it's a great looking OS and run great on old PC HW - there's loads of software available for it too.

[joshhardin]

I ran the intel version of beos 5 in 2001 and it was absolutely amazing. the real benefits of beos were the task scheduler (full multithreaded preemptive multitasking during a time where that simply didn't exist outside of expensive "strange"-hardware unix workstations (like sgi's for example), the graphics subsystem (fully accelerated opengl on supported gpus of which there was a fair number), and a file system that was fully journaling (which was kind of a new tech at the time), and was a complete fully-relational metadata database that was searchable (I've been waiting for others to create a file system like this for some time, but the only other one i'm aware of that uses or can use that kind of thing is microsoft's storage spaces which is super jank, though microsoft has it's unreleased winfs which was trying to do the same thing but never came to fruition, and also it's extremely easy to use graphical interface which you touched on with the locking and unlocking tab system, the pluggable beos tracker, and the ABSOLUTE MAGIC of watching these technologies work together to deliver an os experience that felt WICKED FAST at the time, even when running several heavy applications at once... it utilized adaptive pipelining technologies with it's unique, really-well-tuned scheduler to make a box as responsive as it can be... we're just now seeing some of these optimizations come to modern operating systems on the windows and linux, and os x fronts, but many of the implementations of these ideas are again, very janky modules stacked on traditional os pieces whereas the be system was simply... simple and streamlined. it was way ahead of it's time, and if be didn't ask for so much money when apple tried to license them, i'm positive that be would be os x instead of nextstep being os x.

[NJRoadfan]

I managed to get BeOS 5 PPC working on a 8600 with a G4-450Mhz card. The secret was to not run MacOS 8.6 or later. Apple broke the BeOS bootloader! Install a stock copy of something like 8.1 and start from there. BeOS runs like greased lightning on a G4.

You know what is really annoying? I actually bought a copy of 4.5 and I didn't get those cool stickers!

[egmccann]

man. I liked BeOS back in the day. Had it installed, played with it a bunch but.... had nothing to run on it, which was its biggest problem. It installed nicely on my PC and just did its thing. Really wish we'd had more stuff ported over or developed for it.

[alerey]

9:01 I remember back in the day when using MacOS 8/9 if you dragged a (properly built) 3rd party extension to the closed System Folder, the system opened a pop-up window asking if you want it inside the Extensions folder; other not so well designed extensions you need to manually drag it inside the Extensions folder, by navigating your way inside the System folder.Just my 2 cents for "extension installing" on classic macos; otherwise by misplacing the extension you can get the dreaded 💣 on restart

[btsr]

Thank you 🙏 very much for this clip and all your efforts. My very esteemed colleague, at 11:35 you made my crappy day. When you spoke into the mouse like Scotty, I was under my desk laughing.😂
It happened to me once quite similarly. I tried to install OS/2 2.0 on a 286 with some f?cking antediluvian pre whatever 386 extension card and 4 MB main memory on a 20MB RLL or MFM (not IDE) controlled double height hard disk. After about 4 hours and 30 minutes and over 20 3.5 inch floppies I was able to restart the system. After another 4 hours I was able to move the mouse pointer for appr. 1 cm. The system was for whatever reason not frozen. The performance of this system was slow motion in slow motion in slow motion.
Unfortunately it was not my last OS/2 installation. But the very last one on this system.
Thanks again, stay safe please. Best wishes from Bavaria

[SpikeGrobstein]

I used to run beOS off a jaz drive on my old 7600/132 back in the late 90s. I loved it so much and it was my first introduction to posix and unixy commandline shells. I fell in love with it after seeing gasee demo it at Macworld east 1997 where they handed out the pr2 disk. Im surprised you had so much trouble since it was so easy for 16 year old me who wasn't terribly technical yet.

[baconfister]

I’ve been there before with the endless hours of frustration, and experimenting with every possible hardware configuration tested. Thanks for putting in the effort, much appreciate your videos.

[paulyearley]

In 1999-2000, I had a friend in college who was a BEOS *evangelist* even though by then BeBoxes were hard to come by. I dual-booted it for a little bit on my regular PC to fool around with, and it was nice to use tbh, lackluster software support aside.

[dionelr]

I feel like Action Retro is one ancient Mac away from turning into an super villain.

[badstate]

Be os was astonishing for it's time. I used to live a couple miles from their office and was able to go in for a demo. Dragging six video files to the sides of a rotatable cube and have them all playing at the same time blew my mind.

[TheRetroRoadshow]

I became *obsessed* with BeOS and the BeBox after seeing them featured in a magazine (maybe WiRED?) in the mid-1990's. It took me another ~10 years, but somewhere around 2006 I lucked out and purchased a mostly-functional Dual 66MHz BeBox on eBay for not too much money. I still have it, and consider it one of the 'Crown Jewels' of my retro collection. Weirdly, the "blinkenlights" on the front of my BeBox bounce up-and-down once at POST, and then never again, even after a full OS reinstall. I need to partner with someone who knows these machines (and/or electronics repair) well enough to diagnose and fix it! If anyone has a suggestion, I'd be grateful...

Awesome video, Sean! I hope you return to this experiment - I'd love to see that setup from the pic brought back to life in 202X 🙂