But nothing about the recently mentioned https://cosmoe.org ?
Or their former port to run it atop of Linux, like hosted AROS, or plan 9 from userspace?
Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It was still damn fast though.
I remember years of avoiding DHCP because if the client daemon didn’t get a response boot would hang waiting for it to time out …
Did Gentoo provide much of a performance bump back then? I never really bothered with it since I was stuck with a 486 for the longest time, and by the time I did upgrade distributions were starting to offer "i586" builds (or something to that effect).
For reference, on that same PC I installed Win98 to play Baldur’s Gate. It bluescreened when I plugged in a Microsoft USB mouse. This was a representative experience.
Mac OS of the same vintage wasn’t a paragon of stability exactly, but its stability seemed have more rhyme/reason - there were programs and activities that had a tendency to make your system more crashy while others had little to no impact. You could kinda plan around it, and rebooting after doing the instability-causing thing would clear things up. 95/98(SE)’s instability felt a lot more random which for me made it more day-ruining.
Windows didn’t feel appreciably more stable than the competition until they finally ditched that crappy 9x kernel with Windows 2000, but that release wasn’t intended for general users, which is a shame because it was just as stable as the post-SP1 XP was, maybe more. Consumers got cheated with Windows ME.
The DOS-based Windows versions were just plain bad, and only Microsoft’s illegal product tying kept competitors off of the market. Windows NT 3 was at least stable, but they made it worse moving drivers into the kernel for performance in 4, and it took decades to repair the security damage that caused.
The only "killer app/feature" I know of for Be/Haiku is https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html a radio station automation program, and it's in a weird state where they can't provide hardware that works reliably.
So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices of entrenched companies it would have disrupted.
The theme has been repeated... repeatedly: VHS vs Beta being maybe the typically cited archetype of business model vs technical specs.
To me the dominant example in the world today though, is that s/w engineers continue to use windows 8-(
C:? Does anyone ever stop to think about the abstraction of a file system directory hierarchy? The whole point is to remove the specifics of the h/w implementing it, and provide a logical abstraction of nested "directories". Explicitly specifying drive "letters", is the opposite of that. The only reason it ever existed was because the primordial DOS didn't have the horsepower to manage something like a unix mount. But why do we still have it in 2025?
Business triumphs over technology.
One aspect of the article that didn't track my experience was the description of linux in 2015. By that point I had long ago settled onto the fluxbox window manager, because I didn't like the constant churn of "desktop environments". It all just seemed too much like windows.
In 2025 I'm still using it, and it's still exactly the same, which to me is one of it's greatest features. Personally, I don't want the latest brainchild of some UI engineer at Canonical disrupting my workflow.
This veto power of equity over technical possibility is the story of modern tech development. Cory Doctorow cites this 2014 article in his post today:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
tl;dr US political policy making is 100% controlled by large financial equity stake holders. The support, for or against, a policy by the overwhelming majority of the population has a 0% effect.
This is also true of corporate decisions. "Innovation" is pursued if and only if it benefits equity, regardless of potential advantages to users, or the progress of the tech itself.
Later on, when hard drives were common, people still used things like floppies and optical media. Drive letters were still more meaningful in that context. Drive letters started losing their relevance with USB mass storage (especially when the media was the device), and are minimally relevant today (when external storage is far more likely to be on the network).
The lack of proper abstraction sucks when you have multiple hard drives, but I'm pretty sure that Windows has taken care of that from several angles. Those features simply aren't used often. (And, since I'm not a Windows user, take that bit with a grain of salt.)
I'm not an expert on Haiku but I feel like this is needlessly dismissive of a lot of hard work from some smart and passionate people. 25 years later and the hardware is different and more varied, the things people do with their computers is wildly different, and concerns around things like security and compatibility are very different.
Making an analogy that suggests it's a janky BeOS is just wrong. It's not worse, it's different. It might not be the original nostalgic vision the author wants, but that's what two decades does.
And what are the tombstones of TALIGN1, Amigo, and UUS?
The BeOS code wasn’t huge (I remember the tarball being 98mb) but there was licensed code in the codecs, drivers, compilers, dev tools, possibly in NetPositive and more.
It is cool to look at from a historical perspective, which would be the main reason to release it. I wouldn’t advise using the code as a foundation for any future project.
After a couple demos showing the CPU leds, it just sat there for years, doing nothing but consuming power.
leakycap•6h ago
After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.
It was wild to know NeXT had made inroads so many places. I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. They already saw he could deliver for them on a B&W NeXT-based product used well into the 2000s.
orangecat•6h ago
No kidding. It took until the M1 to make macOS feel anything close to the responsiveness of BeOS on a 150MHz PowerPC.
ksec•5h ago
leakycap•4h ago
Nothing else is as fast, I don't get slowed down by it
Even cursor movement on modern macOS is slow
loloquwowndueo•3h ago
Retric•2h ago
Windows would chug from all sorts of issues, but some things did feel instantaneous.
WillAdams•3h ago
ksec•5h ago
Well iPhone was launched with Cingular, which wasn't AT&T at the time.
leakycap•4h ago
New AT&T Wireless bought Cingular later
betamaxthetape•3h ago
Oh, I would absolutely love to know more details about this. I'm fascinated by the history of telecoms. Would you consider writing a blog post about it? (Or if you prefer, my email is in my profile!)