Yet another Hacker News

45 points ecliptik 2 hours ago 6 comments

renehsz 1 hour ago | parent

To anyone who hasn't already: I really recommend checking out Haiku OS [1], the FOSS successor to BeOS. It's so pleasant to use and supports a surprisingly large catalog of software.

[1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/

ecliptik 52 minutes ago | parent

Claude built me a meta web/notes/code search engine with IOS and MacOS apps, and for fun I asked it to make a Haiku version [1], which it did in under 20 minutes.

With AI I feel like a lot of these bygone-era OS's could see a whole new ecosystem of modern apps within a very short period of time.

1. https://github.com/machiya-kobo/shiori/tree/main#haiku

Singletail 34 minutes ago | parent

I loved my BeBox, but what would be the modern equivalent of the GeekPort? I've been using esp32/nRF52/etc boards for uart/spi/i2c/i2s/pwm-type work... it feels like hardware hacking on a desktop is a lost art.

Narishma 28 minutes ago | parent

The closest modern thing to it is probably the Raspberry Pi GPIO header.

sfblah 32 minutes ago | parent

I would be very interested in a writeup that talked about the likely trajectory of Apple's OS if they had bought BeOS instead.

ndiddy 4 minutes ago | parent

Some former Be employees have commented here in the past saying that Apple made the right decision to buy Next from a technical perspective, as BeOS had poor code quality and was far behind NEXTSTEP in important areas like networking and printing. They also implemented the OS API directly in C++, which tied them to a specific C++ compiler (some mid-90s version of GCC) due to the ABI getting broken in newer versions. The 32-bit version of Haiku (modern BeOS reimplementation) supports BeOS software, and as a result still needs to be compiled with that mid-90s GCC release.

Beyond that, I'm not sure if buying Be would have fixed the managerial problems at Apple. Would they have been able to add the required features to BeOS to turn it into a production OS without the project turning into another Copland? Would the existing Apple management have slimmed down the massive Apple product line that had dozens of nearly identical models? Would it have gotten rid of dead-end projects like Newton and Pippin? Etc.