BeOS - The Forgotten ‘90s Operating System (Retrospective & Demo)

Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this video!

Today we're exploring BeOS, the revolutionary multimedia-focused operating system from the '90s. It tried to compete with both Windows and Mac OS, but was never able to come close in terms of market share. In this video, I explain why, and take you though an in-depth look at what BeOS had to offer.

Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction & History
08:08 - Pre-Installation Info
10:40 - Installation
16:27 - First Boot
17:56 - Interface
25:21 - Applications
40:43 - Outro

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● Music/Credits:
Background Music:
"Sunrise Drive", "Ersatz Bossa", "A Night Alone" and "Soul and Mind" from the YouTube Audio Library

Outro Music: Silent Partner - Bet On It

Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.

#MichaelMJD #BeOS #90s

[robbirobson]

BeOS was a great OS, there was a demonstration where they played 13 mp3 songs simultaneously on a pentium 100 or 133 or so where windows could barely manage to play one without stuttering.

[higgs]

Thank you! I was one of EarthLink's founder employees and I was tasked with evaluating BeOS for the company's use. It was fun seeing it all again.

[tristanraine]

Fun fact, BeOS was referenced in Serial Experiments Lain, as the "To Be continued" used the BeOS colours in the word "Be"

[HutchMuch]

i absolutely love the look of BeOS. its shading is so soft, it’s pixel art is great, and the tabs look better than the window system of other operating systems imo

[uselessDM]

It's sad they never lived into the cloud computing era, introducing their newest product: BeHive

[TheGoatstep]

Fun fact: BeOS is/was actually used in a lot of professional audio/video equipment, like the RADAR 24 24-track audio recorder, Edirol DV-7 video editor made by Roland, and Tascam SX-1 audio recorder - so it did have some success in the A/V professions

[GianmarioScotti]

BeOS will never be forgotten. Even BeOS 4 could do things, no current OS can do. The responsiveness to the user is unparalleled to this day, because all other OSes make compromises towards the resource distribution. Not BeOS, where the user inputs/commands were sacrosanct and to be immediately responded to.

[retrozmachine]

I played around with BeOS back then. Compared to Windows 9x it was remarkably fluid and responsive. The high amount of threading and non-blocking in the design really did make the hardware sing.

[bujin]

29:16. Back in the 90s, most optical drives had an audio out jack, and this was so the optical drive could be placed in audio mode, where the drive would decode an audio CD and send the analog audio directly to the sound card. When you play the audio CD using the CD app you're putting the optical drive into audio CD mode, and it's deciding the CD, and sending the audio out it's analog audio port (which you probably don't have hooked up). When you open the file directly, it's being read like a data file across your digital IDE connection, and your CPU is decoding the audio and sending it your audio card. This is why you're hearing the audio one direction and not the other.

[jeffmccloud]

I owned BeOS. wrote a little C++ on it too. it was ahead of its time. it touted "multi processor computing" way before dual CPUs was even a thing, let alone multi-cores and hyperthreading. it was designed from the ground up for multitasking/threading. and also, cool Amiga-like icons.

[eriksiers]

I bought BeOS 5 for the PC. It was a great OS but had little support from the industry.

[RichardHoule]

Haha. I actually wrote device drivers for BeOS!

It had some interesting features and design. But it had flaws.

For example, the multithreaded UI was something that a lof of developer ended having problems to work with. If I remember correctly, instead of having the concept of a "main thread", they had one thread per window. Which is something that no other operating system was doing. It was easy to create race condition if your underlying model was aware of that. (Hint: Still today, most application are poorly threaded!)

[animatewithdermot]

I loved playing with Be. I remember running something like 15 or 20 instances of the Phantom Menace trailer, with some of them mapped onto a spinning 3D cube, no frame loss, all audio playing fine in an overlapping madness. Showed it to my friend, a very good C++ programmer who worked for Disney Interactive, he just cracked up. "OK, I get the point!"
It was so sad that there was never a killer app with video editing or a PS equivalent. And also, screw M$.

[MAKER_GURU]

I was a system designer for a small computer company back when this hit the market. I was tasked with evaluating this software, the original idea being to offer machines with this as a reduced-cost option to avoid the Windows license fee. The OS worked well being snappier and more stable than Windows, the only real issues being with certain hardware lacking support. Unfortunately, some of these parts were the cheapest options which sort of killed the whole 'cheaper option' feature. But that wasn't really the big issue. The big issue was the software support. Budget and business clients both wanted approximately the same software, which wasn't available. Gamers wanted games, which were not available. The hardware for a good multimedia experience was expensive and came with Windows software that was better than what BeOS came with; the cheap knock-offs that came a bit later didn't work with BeOS anyway. We still offered it along with a slew of other OS options. We even offered it as a part of a multi-boot configuration; a service we didn't charge for. We never sold a single computer with it. People bought DOS-only machines after Windows 98 came out, people bought Linux-only machines when X was basically useless and getting software was a chore involving magazine CDs or pay-per-hour dialup internet...but they never even gave this a chance as a second boot option.

[TheRandomChannel_idk]

Fun Fact: The Fake Windows Whistler (what would become Windows XP) Shutdown Sound actually came from BeOS 5. The actual startup and shutdown are all from Windows 2000.

[DMNTDstrangr]

I always loved BeOS. The problems arose around pc gaming just like they did for Linux. BeOS was so polished it was hard to go back to Windows until you realized that there was virtually no software for it other than what it came with.

[NormanF]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! BeOS lives on in its modern spiritual descendant, Haiku OS. Basically the same with porting from BSD to make it compatible with modern hardware and its now 64 bit. What a long strange journey its been and despite the fact it went nowhere, we’re fortunate its still with us today!

[Ganiscol]

I preordered BeOS back in the day and was hyped when I got my package! After installing it and a lot of "Wow! This looks awesome!" and "Finally harnessing the power of my PC in a way Windows never could!" the sobering reality set in that there wasnt much I could do with it at the time and the out of the box functionality was very, very limited.

But I was in on it from the beginning to its not too distant demise. 😅

[FloatingDogs]

BeOS was my daily driver in the early 2000. I loved that it was so lightweight, fast, and did everything I needed. For browsing the Internet and to watch DVDs or MPK/MP4, I only used it!

[Pwtz]

This was a real blast to watch again. I used BeOS as my primary OS for a bit of time just to see if it could be done and it was the closest I ever felt to thinking it had a chance. I hosted a live blog on it for about a year or so to the internet.