My husband would like to borrow my HN account to post this story:<p>While working at either Netscape or AOL (he can't remember which side of the transition it was), a developer BeBox was delivered, to assist in porting Netscape to BeOS. It was one of the first dual-processor machines that many devs had ever seen.<p>It had an activity monitor which showed two bar graphs for the load of each CPU, but unusually, you could click on each CPU to turn it on and off, to turn the system into a single-CPU machine.<p>He wondered what happened if you turned both off. So he did. The machine obediently froze, and had to be hard rebooted.<p>You'd never find an OS that let you do that today!
If interested, please take a look at its up-to-date evolution<p><a href="https://www.haiku-os.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.haiku-os.org</a><p>I tested on real hardware too, and it worked well
BeOS was such a delight to use. It <i>respected the user</i>. No circles of death, no beachballs. UI responsiveness considered an actual priority. Gobe productive was my office software of choice for a long time, too. Good times.
Ahh, BeOS. I used it has a daily driver for about 6 months. It was fairly nice, but my job moved from Mainframe/VMS/Minicomputer work more towards Web related work (it was along time ago for the kids reading along) and I had to put away my toy and start learning more on my Linux boxes when I wasn't working.<p>Spent a lot of time learning the kernel and support "kits" and porting some of my large baseball related code to it.<p>Could'a been a nice little operating system despite forcing me to learn C++ better.
For older hardware I understand 86Box to be more "sympathetic" to hardware quirks than QEMU.<p><a href="https://86box.readthedocs.io/en/latest/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://86box.readthedocs.io/en/latest/</a>
This is a great HN thread about BeOS:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062</a> (Jan 9, 2020, 420 comments)<p>(Found it while writing a comment that was voided by that thread...)
BeOS is the batmobile of Operating Systems.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hackneys.com/docs/in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.hackneys.com/docs/in-the-beginning-was-the-comma...</a>
BeOS went all in on mid-1990s C++ which was a terrible language in many ways. It was a brittle and awkward foundation for operating system APIs.<p>Oddly enough, Objective-C, which seemed like a loser at the time, fared much better and still underpins the GUI classes in Apple’s operating systems. The simple syntax and dynamic nature of Obj-C gave it much better longevity.<p>(In addition to BeOS, there was another major commercial operating system created in the mid-90s with a pure C++ API. It was called Symbian, and unlike BeOS it was actually very popular for a while. In 2003-2011 hundreds of millions of Symbian devices were sold, mostly Nokia smartphones. But even though these devices supported native apps with advanced features like OpenGL, few apps were made because the API was so baroque, and anyway few users would discover the apps because there wasn’t a simple app store. Symbian is a great example of having the right ideas early but a completely wrong approach to implementing them.)