Requiem for an OS
Today is the 10th birthday of the venerable BeOS, and OS News has a nice write-up about the OS that was a shining beacon in the darkness of the mid-nineties. I'll never forget putting it on a PowerMac 8500/180 and being absolutely blown away by the brutal injection of steroids it gave the system.
It was awesome to watch a machine that could barely run OS 9 acceptably turn into a mad multi-media hot rod. Remember the cube demo? Launch a cube, set it to spin, then map running video to each side of the cube and watch your CPU max out, hear the hard drive spin like a hamster on meth, and the cube gracefully rotate without dropping any frames. Whoa!
This was during the same lugubrious time period that I migrated my main workstation to NT 4--yes, kicking and screaming--since OS 9 simply couldn't cope anymore. Or I couldn't cope with it. Even a hard crash a week is too many, and having mp3s stutter uncontrollably every time you launch an application or run a Photoshop filter was no way to meet the new millennium. NT 4 was an ugly beast, and certainly had more than its fair share of system administration psychotic episodes, but it multitasked like a champ, and with some tender loving care would stay up for long time periods.
And yet, running Windows is simply no way to enjoy using a computer, so the BeOS seemed like the proverbial knight in shining armor. Ran like a champ. Stayed up forever. Had the Bash shell. Most of the good stuff from Linux without having to spend endless freaking hours configuring the thing and the great GUI of OS 9. What was not to like?
So it was extremely sad to watch the BeOS slowly being ground under the boot heel of the marketplace until the day when Be, Inc. died.
Mac OS X certainly Doesn't Suck in its own right, but it doesn't make me giggle. And if there was one thing the BeOS did, it was make me giggle.
Listening To: "Reason" by Rosetta Stone 
