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BeOS DEMO VIDEO

koyhoge · 63.2K views · 2011-03-13 · 19:54

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Overview

The official demo video from Be, Inc. showing BeOS running multiple videos, media applications and a responsive desktop on 1990s hardware.

On Hacker News

HN people cite it as evidence of how fast and responsive a well-designed microkernel desktop could be on modest hardware.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2012–2022

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What people said

nickpsecurity · 2016-03 · Recommendation

"Tanenbaum mentions commentators on slashdot who never tried a microkernel. That's me and I never tried to write an OS either. " "Suppose I'm just interested in desktop applications. Linux is already treated as a lost cause. That's what gets me because at the moment, the microkernels don't seem like an alternative in my case. If I'm not yet convinced by the opponents, I'm looking for facts, not anecdotes or authority. " Ahh, OK. Well, I'm guessing you probably used Windows/DOS desktops back in the 1990's, right? They were OK for apps but architecturally terrible. That meant they crashed a lot, slogged down under heavy load, and so on. UNIX and Linux didn't do much better outside of SGI's machines. Hell, were barely usable. You'll appreciate what this microkernel-based, concurrency-oriented desktop is doing if you remember those days: [VIDEO] Note: I couldn't even drag videos without them skipping back then. They do that in the demo while other stuff is playing. Too bad Microsoft had a monopoly and Jobs turned them down for Darwin in Next (later became Mac OS X). An early great one that's in all kinds of stuff is QNX microkernel. It did a POSIX-compatible implementation w/ microkernel, fast message-passing, and hard real-time. Later showed off its capabilities with a desktop on a floppy with GUI, web browser, etc. Users, including Animats (Nagle) here, said you could be doing day-to-day stuff with big compiles in background with no hit to responsiveness due to its great schedu

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beosrocks · 2012-04 · Recommendation

dr_dank's comment on Slashdot ( [LINK] ) pretty much sums up its awesomeness: BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper. He yanked the plug on the box. Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened. If you've never played with BeOS on an old Pentium II, it's hard to imagine the kind of performance it was able to squeeze out of that hardware. Here's a rough idea: [VIDEO]

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pcurve · 2022-11 · Reference

New-ish video of actual BeBox running in HD video quality [LINK] I didn't know it had functional LED light meter in front of the case. very cool. Obligatory demo from the 90s [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by koyhoge, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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