BeBox is a Haiku application that emulates Be Inc.'s BeBox

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85 points by rguiscard 23 hours ago on hackernews | 31 comments

mlmonkey | 22 hours ago

"Be" .... now that's a blast from the past! :-D

alberth | 22 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.

multiplegeorges | 21 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.

ErroneousBosh | 12 hours ago

I've moved back to Haiku as my daily driver for a lot of stuff. Unfortunately it doesn't really have a good video editor yet, so I'm stuck with Linux for that at least.

mdp2021 | 11 hours ago

> Haiku as my daily driver for a lot of stuff

Can you expand? What works well, what may need more work, what is not there...

: ErroneousBosh | 6 hours ago
Python, Vim, and a web browser, which is fine for developing Flask apps ;-)
It's not great for running virtual machines, but then it's not Linux.
On my laptop it's not great at power management and it doesn't suspend when I shut the lid.
So far there isn't video editing package, so really it's just down to sticking with Linux for DaVinci Resolve.

cosmic_cheese | 20 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 | 13 hours 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.

majorchord | 20 hours ago

I'm fairly certain that BeOS never supported the 486

nrr | 17 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.

: alberth | 7 hours ago
Whoops, you're right. I was confused which machine I had BeOS on.
This was my Pentium III.
My 486 was the machine immediately before my Pentium III.
I installed BeOS when I got my new Pentium III in 1999/2000.

MomsAVoxell | 17 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..)

: ardenpm | 15 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.
: JKCalhoun | 12 hours 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:
[1] https://youtu.be/5IFxwnXASyQ

mdp2021 | 12 hours ago

> difficulty was no apps

Well, how fortunate we are now, being able to do simplified coding through LLMs. AROS and Haiku and MenuetOS (etc.) could get a boost in software availability soon.

throwaway270925 | 9 hours ago

> It was shockingly performant, especially with anything graphical.

I had the same experience.

Only few things came close since: QNX, my M1 MBP when it was new and a fresh MXLinux installation (no idea how they do it, maybe some low latency scheduler?)

Those felt similarly instant GUI-wise as BeOS did, while unfortunately current MacOS and Win11 feel glacial compared to it.

ranger_danger | 21 hours ago

Now just combine it with Cosmoe[1] so you can run it from Linux too.

[1] https://pappp.net/?p=95060

PAPPPmAc | 21 hours ago

How odd to come into a thread and find a link to my share-with-note (see name/url) instead of a link to the OSNews article it's a share of.

thisislife2 | 12 hours ago

Check out https://v-os.dev/ - it's been adopted to create a new Linux distro that's a hybrid of Linux and Haiku. Pretty light on resource and the Be / Haiku GUI feels so good.

: 0x445442 | 10 hours ago
However the kernel differences between Linux and BeOS/NewOS are really part and parcel of Be/Haiku. It's like running Smalltalk in the terminal.

hexapus | 21 hours ago

I really do need to play with Haiku more.

: hdjdnxjzhzhs | 14 hours ago
I want to make haiku.rs

YVoyiatzis | 20 hours ago

If only for the UI. Back then, all bring white and beige and Windows blue screenofdesthblye. Be OS was pure joy, if only to play around with. Many third-party developers (remember sharewsre) took s liking to the Be aesthetic and ran away with it.

alfiedotwtf | 14 hours ago

What the hell happened to BeBox and QNX?! They were the pinnacle of blitz. I’ve got a beefy machine to run large LLM models, but recently installing a new Debian, Gnome struggles after booting because of their packaging manager running 100% for a few minutes, following by random lag. Like wtf we had speed 26 years ago :(

mdp2021 | 12 hours ago

I understand that part of the latest efforts in Linux have been to use NNs to analyze code in order to speed up subsystems.

: alfiedotwtf | 7 hours ago
I’ve found LLMs have been incredible in speeding up code. Hopefully they’ll end the past decades of software performance expanding into the hardware it’s give

thinker5555 | 11 hours ago

I was just telling my 10 year old about QNX last night, and how it was an amazing feat to have a whole graphical desktop with apps all fit on a 1.44mb floppy disc. Since he's missing so much of the context of "the ancient times", he didn't exactly share my enthusiasm, but at least he humored me a bit for my trip down memory lane.

pjmlp | 8 hours ago

QNX keeps going on high integrity computing, a domain where hypervisors and microkernels actually matter.

https://qnx.software

https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/8.0/index.html

: alfiedotwtf | 7 hours ago
That warms my heart

cbm-vic-20 | 9 hours ago

The BeBox was so cool. I'm surprised no gaming-oriented PC builder has replicated the CPU activity LEDs. The GeekPort was also fun- in my dorm someone on my floor had a BeBox and used the GeekPort to control a robot arm. At least that came back in the form of the Raspberry Pi GPIO connector.

: pjmlp | 8 hours ago
As if they already don't have enough colours, agree with the BeBox remark though.