11 comments

  • alberth 5 hours ago

    I recall dual booting BeOS circa 1999/2000, on my 486dx2-66.

    It was shockingly performant, especially with anything graphical.

    The difficulty was no apps.

    Brings back fond memories, nonetheless.

    • MomsAVoxell an hour ago

      There were a few apps, a word processor, a 3D modeling and rendering application, some media players, a basic DAW and so on .. but the web browser situation kind of wasn’t so great, and there were still holes in the OS where future features had been promised, a bit too long imho ..

      (Disclaimer: you can pry my still-functioning BeBox from my cold dead hands.. okay, I admit, I only use it a couple times a year just to be sure it still boots..)

    • majorchord 4 hours ago

      I'm fairly certain that BeOS never supported the 486

      • nrr 42 minutes ago

        Specifically, the BeOS required support for the rtdsc instruction for its timing, and that was only available on the Pentium chips or later.

    • cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago

      It was ridiculously fast on my family’s Dimension 4100 tower, which had a 750Mhz PIII in it. The 98SE install that machine shipped with was glacial in comparison, and though Win2K shrunken the gap dramatically it still wasn’t as fast as BeOS.

      I was able to find a decent number of apps on BeBits but a lot of stuff was missing.

    • multiplegeorges 5 hours ago

      It had a decent number of apps, I drove it as my primary OS for a while.

      Ended up using Linux, but it was a great OS for its time.

  • YVoyiatzis 4 hours ago

    If only for the UI. Back then, all bring white and beige and Windows blue screenofdesthblye. Be OS was pure joy, if only to play around with. Many third-party developers (remember sharewsre) took s liking to the Be aesthetic and ran away with it.

  • hexapus 4 hours ago

    I really do need to play with Haiku more.

  • mlmonkey 6 hours ago

    "Be" .... now that's a blast from the past! :-D

  • ranger_danger 5 hours ago

    Now just combine it with Cosmoe[1] so you can run it from Linux too.

    [1] https://pappp.net/?p=95060

    • PAPPPmAc 4 hours ago

      How odd to come into a thread and find a link to my share-with-note (see name/url) instead of a link to the OSNews article it's a share of.