BeOS

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Revision as of 13:17, 5 November 2008 by Maxwell (Talk | contribs) (Intent of Progress)

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BeOS Opening Screen

What was BeOS?

BeOS was an operating system founded by ex Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée in 1990, in hopes of creating a completely new computer operating system created for media professionals from the ground up. BeOS was orignially created to run on a specific set of hardware, called the BeBOX, however Be Inc. was forced to port the OS to run on a variety of machines. It directly competed with both Apples Mac OS,NeXT's NeXT Step Windows 95, and LINUX. While it was UNIX-like, the BeOS contained only new and proprietary code, a selling point of the system as it was not based off of 20 year old code and programming models. It was said to have been operating system which was future "to be the ultimate operating system for processor-intensive multimedia and Internet applications", and had many innovative features not seen in rival operating systems which have only been met in recent generation of operating systems. The general idea for the operating system is captured from a section of the mirrored Be Inc. website from 1999:

Graph of Age From BeOS Marketing Material
"The company wanted to step beyond the evolutionary approach to personal computing architectures; to see what could be accomplished if you built a personal computer using new assumptions, based on cutting-edge software design concepts, and designed for the next decade's applications, rather than the last decade"

(http://www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/products/introtobe/)

General Decline

BeOS failed for a number of reasons, most of them being tied to business related environmental failures. At its heart, the operating system was unable to secure a large variety of developers to continue to make a wide variety of software which to run on the machine. Another early limitation was the processor specific architecture, as BeOS was not originally portable across different hardware platform, a folly of a business decision when they tried to bundle their hardware with their software (a la Apple 2008). In early 2002, founder Jean-Louis Gassée left after being sold to Palm Inc, and shortly after BeOS was open-sourced, and the Haiku project is the closest relative of the BeOS.

Relevence of BeOS as a Dead Media

One of the main reasons BeOS is an interesting Dead Medium to study is that it was created with such political and deterministic goals in mind. From these goals, one can extrapolate both the intent within the context of when BeOS was created, and well as to place it within a context of a greater technology history.

Intent of Progress

BeOS was created with a specific purpose: to be "the Media OS" (BeOS website). All of the technical advancements, which today seem somewhat old hat, were really pioneering features which shaped the current PC landscape. Selling the very idea of an operating system which was completely "rebuilt from the ground up" and not based of code which in many cases was more than 20 years old. Coming only a little short on "year-zero" rhetoric, the BeOS was created "today" for "tomorrow".

This purpose, coupled with the fact that Be was so focused on creating completely new code, without and of the "cruft" of old operating systems marks a pointent change from how software is normally created. In much of the technology landscape, progress is a function of modernity, with product iterations building from previous versions, being systematically improved, repackaged, and sold as brand-new. Technology innovation then, while it may be marketed as "all new" are restrained by the pre-existing limitations and choices of previous iterations of the product.

In a computer operating system, these hang-ups have drastic effect on what the computer and its users conceive the computing meta-machine can achieve. Many choices within the system architecture can result in end user limitations, as can more user facing, interface elements which prevent users from exerting full control over the machine. Other operating systems are patched and repurposed to achieve tasks that they were not necessarily created to do, in the name of deadlines and not re-inventing the wheel.

BeOS was creating with a technological determinist position in mind: to create something which rethought these innovations not as progressive improvement, but as a clean slate, rethinking past innovations as starting points, rather than the result of years of progress.

For example, looking at some of the advertised underlying technology benefits from a technical white paper, we can see these innovations being touted much before BeOS's competitors (Forgive me for the overly technical nature of this quote) :

" Technical Benefits


In their place was put an architecture specifically designed for handling intensive tasks, such as digital audio and video. The building blocks include:

  • Symmetric multiprocessing - Take advantage of two, four or more processors in a single machine.
  • Pervasive multithreading - Multithreading takes large tasks, such as applications, and breaks them down into a myriad of smaller tasks. Pervasive multithreading means that this approach is used throughout the BeOS, from the kernel, through the graphics and I/O systems, and through BeOS applications.
  • Preemptive multitasking - The BeOS works on and rapidly switches between dozens, often hundreds, of smaller tasks. These tasks can be deployed on a single processor, providing a smooth multitasking environment, or across any number of processors in a multiprocessor system.
  • 64-bit journaling file system - This enables extremely large volumes and files, of terabyte size and more, enough to handle even raw uncompressed, high-resolution video and audio -- the foundation for high-quality editing systems. The Be file system goes even further, providing database capabilities allowing the storage of multiple attributes and indexes along with files.
  • Object-oriented APIs - The BeOS API makes programming easy and efficient.

Why BeOS said about the individual using the personal computer?

The BeOS was a classic example of a product which had a very structured, deliberate use value which it proposed for consumers, and perhaps was too limited for mainstream adoption. Unlike other dead media, the people who were using the BeOS were in fact using it in the way in which it was constructed. Being a revisionist product, BeOS hoped to capitalize on user actions which were being misrepresented in other computer products. highly political example of something created to fulfill and ideal, not necessarily. used for that purpose.


What BeOS said about the technology at the time:

BeOS was loaded with techno-politics, some of which can still be seen today in current companies technogly platforms.


References

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMGbDJmgv0

http://oreilly.com/catalog/beosprog/book/

http://www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft/

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=%22Be+inc.%22&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&submit=sub

http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml The above article is excerpted from Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc. by Owen W. Linzmayer, 1999, ISBN 1-886411-28-X,

http://www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/products/beos/mediaos.html BeOS technical White Paper