[linguae]

I'm a big fan of Jean-Louis Gassée and I wish there were more visionaries like him in the personal computing industry. He helped push the Mac further during his tenure at Apple, and his work at BeOS also pushed the state of the art of personal computing. There are two major standouts in his career that I greatly appreciate:

1. His transformation of the Mac from the non-expandable appliance it was in the original 1984 Macintosh to Macs that supported expansion slots, such as the Macintosh II and the Macintosh SE. The Macintosh II series led to other expandable Macs such as the Quadra, the Power Macintosh, and the Mac Pro. While the Mac Pro would lose its expansion slots when the 2013 Mac Pro was released, the latest Mac Pro has expansion slots again, and I hope Apple keeps them if it releases an ARM version of the Mac Pro.

2. His work at Be, Inc. after his departure from Apple. I never had the chance to use BeOS (I was in elementary school during the heyday of BeOS), but I've read a lot about it. In my opinion, one of BeOS's most interesting features is its searchable file system. Indeed, the creator of BeOS's file system, Dominic Giampaolo (who wrote a well-written, accessible introductory textbook on file system design), moved to Apple after Be's demise and worked on Spotlight, which is macOS's search tool.

[MisterTea]

Spent many hours on BeOS and visited their booth at PCexpo in NYC around 1999. The big draw was the multimedia centric OS where the GUI always remained responsive. It also did things like allow you to open up a dozen AVI files on a single core sub 1GHz Pentium 2/3 and not have the computer grind to a halt. Instead the videos skipped frames and you continue to work on other programs. It was a pleasant experience compared to the rough shape of early Linux/BSD and the obtuse horror show that was Windows 95/98. We even had a somewhat working port of Netscape and there was some momentum building behind it. But then came Windows 2000 and Be sorta lost steam on the desktop and then went in some bizarre internet appliance direction and it was over shortly after.

Don't quote me on this but the another powerful feature was the decoupling of media codecs from programs. Adding support for a new media codec was as simple as dropping a .so lib file into a /lib/codec directory and all your media programs now supported that codec. This applied to all media including audio, video and images. This was all part of the BeOS API.

It also had a decent c++ API and multithreading was a first class concept in the system allowing one to easily write programs to take advantage of multiple processors. That allowed the machine to easily scale as you added more processors, something Windows 98 couldn't do at the time. This was well before the concept of multi-core. Back then you needed more sockets to add more processors and it wasn't cheap.

[factsonly]

Try out https://www.haiku-os.org it's the spiritual successor and binary compatible.

[Torwald]

The BeOS is also featured in Neil Stephenson's "In the beginning there was the command line"

https://steve-parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/index.sh...