I’ve fallen out of like with the web’s usual April Fool’s day shenanigans (on account of being an old humorless curmudgeon), but this one hits joyously close to home.
Toward the end of the BeOS era, I was working with the publishers of the Linux Journal to create a sister publication, the BeOS Journal (this is true – not making this up). I was the senior editor, and had commissioned and packaged all of the content. We had the first issue in the bag and had already gone to layout when Be made the formal announcement that it was folding their cards. Of course, the BeOS Journal went down along with it, and issue #1 never saw the light of day.
But today is a great day. Seven years later, the publishers of Linux Journal have finally come to their senses, and have decided to drop Linux coverage in favor of full-time BeOS content. The introductory video speaks for itself.
The day we’ve anticipated for so long has finally arrived. I’m thrilled to see the technology world finally sitting up and taking notice of the greatest OS ever developed. Though I unfortunately can no longer promise to be a substantial contributor to the project, I’ll be reading BeOS Journal regularly and cheering from the sidelines. Hup hup!
Also excellent today: ThinkGeek is running a special on the Super Pii Pii Brothers video game for Wii controllers (see video). Now that’s compelling game content!
Back in the BeOS days, I created a public database of tips and how-to information for BeOS users, called the BeOS Tip Server (betips.net). The site had grown to around 700 tips when Be, Inc. finally went under and I went looking for another career. At that time, I handed ownership of the Tip Server over to a still-avid BeOS user, and didn’t think about it much again.
Late last year, I discovered that links to betips.net were dead. I contacted the owner, only to learn that the database and the site templates had been lost in a data disaster. I combed through my backups and archives and couldn’t find any sign of the templates. However, amazingly, I still had a copy of the mysql database. Dug my old x86 laptop out of the closet, booted BeOS for the first time in eons, and found the original site templates tucked away in a buried folder. Eureka! But ewww… all table-based and mid-90s looking… just fugly.
Even though I have almost no interest in BeOS these days, I was once proud of the site, both for the content it had amassed and for the method I had used to serve it (TrackerBase).
Couldn’t stand the thought of the whole thing being lost to history, so decided to resurrect the site. Took a fair bit of grunt work to clean up the data and get the tables into shape as a WordPress back-end, but the work is finally done, I’ve got control of the domain again, and intend to leave the site up for posterity. There’s a standing offer for any current BeOS/Haiku users to help clean up old content and start adding new.
BeOS has an open source descendant called Haiku. I’ve never run Haiku, but expect that most of the content on the site will apply for that OS as well. I’m also interested in having new Haiku-specific content added to the repository.
The fact that OS X still has no central FileTypes preferences panel for controlling associations between file types and the applications they launch in, defining new file types, seeing and editing metadata associated with filetypes, etc. is, IMO, a glaring omission from OS X. BeOS, of course, had File Types nailed. OS X has inherited and expanded on a lot of great ideas from BeOS over the past few years, but for some reason still keeps this kind of control out of the user’s hands (you can set the application associated with a file, or with all files “of this type” from Info property panels, but seriously – this kind of functionality should be baked into the system preferences panel.
The excellent RCDefaultApp gives you the control you’re looking for. Let’s just hope something similar is in Leopard.
&tConvening themes: The world viewed as a network of digital photographers collectively shooting every square inch of the globe, the ability to stitch those images together into a cohesive, navigable, continuous view, and the world-changing cognitive power of zooming through scale, now becoming commonplace.
Dan Sandler points out that Google Street View (which is mind-blowing both in its power and its privacy implications) is not only one of the few Google apps to require Flash, it’s also “the first Google app to feature the Be Man:”
Thanks for the images Dan.
Humor, history, and coincidence aside, Street View changes the world, just a little bit for the better and a little bit for the worse. For the SF Chronicle, Mark Morford on Street View as invasive: I Can See Your Thong From Here:
Ah, Google, you great wicked benevolent super-cool vaguely disturbing Big Brother überbitch mega-company, quietly taking over the entire goddamn Net universe and most of the terrestrial world, too, one cool but simultaneously unnerving innovation at a time. … The question has been raised: How much is too much? How much implied privacy should we have as a society, as a community, as a city, and do we let this sort of technology run free simply because the draconian creepiness of it all is so easily offset by how damn fascinating and helpful and nifty a utility it so very obviously is?
Posted last August about Photosynth, a product emerging from Microsoft Labs designed not only to be a digital photo album conceptually way beyond iPhoto or Aperture, but that is also capable of intelligently stitching together images from disparate sources into zoom-able, photographic, 3-D representations of places on earth. In this video from a recent TED conference, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrates a 3-D, navigable reconstruction of the cathedral at Notre Dame created by stitching together images scraped from Flickr — photos taken with everything from cell phones to high-quality SLRs, by photographers who have never met one another.
I’ve been playing a bit with Flickr Maps and looking more into the options for geotagging photos, but Photosynth blows the doors off the concepts of 2-D image-place connections, opening up a realm where all photographers on earth are unintentionally collaborating on a single, global, steerable, zoomable view that never ends.
Steven Berlin Johnson did a fascinating seminar for The Long Now Foundation (available both as podcast and as a summarized blog entry) on what he calls “the long zoom” — an entirely new way of grokking our world, started by the famous Powers of 10 and now becoming almost de rigeur thanks to emerging photo / video / vector technologies. What once blew your mind (and all previous senses of scale and proportion in the universe) with “Powers of 10″ has become an increasingly commonplace quick swoop around Google Earth to find a business address.
BeOS used to market itself as the “Buzzword Enabled Operating System.”
Got a call from someone recently who was going to be speaking at a public event, wanting to make sure I could set them up with a “Web 2.0-capable laptop.” And so I did. Wasn’t hard, neither.
Just when you thought you’d never see an example of computing hardware as enchanting as the BeBox, original hardware designer Joseph Palmer announces its resurrection – this time with 16 processors! And you thought pervasive multithreading on two CPUs was good. While he was at it, Palmer has added 16 (yes, 16) MIDI ports, a RAID 5 drive config, 64GB memory, and two GeekPorts. I think my time with OS X just might be drawing to a close. I hear the Haiku project is thriving these days.
Whoa! Birdhouse reader Jamie Wilkinson just emailed to let me know he had been doing some BeOS research at Wikipedia, not found an entry for my name, and had decided to create one! I made some small tweaks and added a couple of scripts to the list, but Jamie did a great job of summarizing things accurately. Not sure whether this means I’ve arrived or been put out to pasture…
Back in 2001, I had some fun with Leonard Nimoy’s monologue Visit To a Sad Planet by shooting a series of overly literal scenes illustrating the piece, and editing them in Adamation’s personalStudio for BeOS. Decided tonight to put it up on YouTube, just because I could, and to see if gets any traction.
A higher-resolution version is at the original Sad Planet page, which describes a bit of the shooting process.
Haven’t tried this myself, but a reader just pointed out SpotMeta, which extends the Mac OS X filesystem to include fully customizable metadata fields, presumably searchable by Spotlight.
Based on how OS X has progressively integrated some of the coolest features of BeOS, I predict that something similar to this will soon ship natively in the system. So I’m not exactly eager to start tacking on 3rd party extensions to the filesystem — yahweh knows how the two would interact when extensible metadata becomes “official.” But it’s cool to see people thinking in these terms.
Rear-view mirror: Peachpit’s official website for the BeOS Bible was beosbible.com, and included chapter excerpts, entire chapters that were written for the book but never published, and updates for R4.5. The site was taken offline shortly after the book went out of print. Eventually, Peachpit granted me permission to mirror the contents elsewhere, but they were only able to supply a very broken, partial archive of the original site. I of course had copies of the content I had written for it, but it was going to take a lot of work to fix the fragmented tarball they had supplied. Today, out of nowhere, a user named Oren Bear provided me with a complete, working copy of the original site, which had apparently been hoovered off the web by an unknown reader years ago, and has been floating around on P2P networks ever since. Thanks to Oren, I’m finally able to reproduce beosbible.com in its entirety.
I always thought it was a funny-looking site, with odd navigation, but there you go. One for the archives.
In the newsgroup alt.os.linux.redhat lives a current thread titled “OsX compared to Linux and BeOS” (gratuitously x-posted to a handful of other OS groups) — a fairly typical bottomless OS war, er, reasoned discussion, either fascinating or tedious depending on your disposition.
First of all, I’m floored that anyone in the universe is asking whether BeOS is a viable alternative four years after the company bit the dust. That’s funny bit #1. But this excerpt had me rolling:
>>> is there anyone who knows OS X and Linux well who can
>>> make an honest and reasoned comparison of the two?
>> Scot Hacker?
> Fribilty Jones.
So that’s what it’s come to. Get a job, have a baby, fade from the OS scene, and before you know it, you may as well be Fribilty Jones. Less than zero. Dang, it rolls off the tongue nicely though. Fribilty Jones. Fribilty Jones. Fribilty Jones. Must … create … pseudonym …
This slashdot comment reminded me of a story that used to get tossed around at BeOS gatherings:
lcsaudio used to sell BeBoxes (remounted in a custom rackmount case) as part of our show control system. One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that a 66MHz BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.
Music: Mike Watt :: Pluckin’, Pedalin’ and Paddlin’
It’s 2004, a decade since the earliest versions of BeOS started shipping to developers. Over at OSNews.com, Eugenia Loli-Queru has a nice memorial piece commemorating the anniversary.
I haven’t run BeOS for a couple of years now, though it was certainly the core of my technical life for half a decade. Recently dusted off my old laptop (an early generation dell pentium, 64MBs) and booted Win2K. It was so slow I simply could not use it. All I really needed was a shell and a text editor for the day, so I booted its BeOS partition for the first time in a long time and was amazed all over again. The exact same hardware, but the OS was easily 10x faster. Such a treat. I’m committed to OS X these days, and mostly love it, but will always consider BeOS my only OS “tru luv”. Thanks for the memory walk, Eugenia. And thanks to everyone who ever worked at Be for creating such an outstanding monument to technical possibility.
Andrea “hawksmoor” Scatena interviewed me a bit ago for Beyond Magazine : “BeOS, AmigaOS, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD.” He wanted to know my thoughts about the various BeOS variants floating around today. Pulled no punches in my answers. In fact, I was so candid I half-expected them not to run it, but they did. Current issue is downloadable now (PDF).
Be had more than 100 employees and $25 million in the bank at one point. Full-time engineers and a bunch of committed commercial developers (Adamation, BeatWare, Gobe…). With all of that, BeOS barely stood a snowball’s chance in hell. Without any of that, without any hope of developing momentum — EVER — it’s all so much less than zero. It’s very hard for me to understand why there are still people hanging out in the ghost town.
and:
Look, sometimes we do things in this life for irrational reasons, for love. If you love BeOS and don’t care about the apps or the practicality, then by all means use it, be happy, it’s “all part of life’s rich pageant.” Just don’t start to think BeOS is going to have some kind of renaissance, or take over the world, or provide a means for developers or users to make money. Love is the only remaining reason to use the system. And maybe that’s reason enough.
Andrea is a good guy. His commitment and love is shining – exactly the kind of vibe that made the BeOS community unlike any technology sphere I’ve experienced before or since.
Raise your hand if you sold all your BEOS stock when things became hopeless. If you kept it until March 15, 2002, you may be paddling a new canoe this Fall. Microsoft just agreed to pay Be $23,250,000 and “admit no wrongdoing” to put the lingering lawsuit to bed forever. The spoils go to those who held Be stock after March 15.
In case you missed all the fun, this is the sort of wrongdoing to which Microsoft is not admitting, but for the sin of which it has ultimately agreed to pay.
In the BeOS days there was a fair bit of argument (no doubt repurposed from Linux turf) analogizing the healthy necessity of biodiversity in nature and platform diversity in the computing world. This line of thought beautifully re-played in Martin Price’s recent piece on Platform Diversity.
Personally, I’m sick of hearing about keeping systems secure from so-called “security experts.” All they ever talk about is patching Windows. You never hear one suggest that it might be a good thing if we weren’t all running the same stupid software. Of course they don’t. The lack of security in Windows is their bread and butter.
Three bits of BeOS-related stuff bubbled to the surface today.
* Ludovic Hirlimann contacted me looking for a shout-out. He scored one of the really early AT&T Hobbit-based BeBoxen at an auction a while ago. Here is the version of BeOS it runs. Recently the hard drive died, and Ludovic needs to reinstall, and therein lies the problem — the machine won’t take any of the “recent” versions of BeOS — he needs the antique Hobbit-system install floppies, or a disk image from another machine. Contact him if you can help. He’s looking for the GUI version, not the early-early CLI-only system.
* While prepping some content for matthewsperry.org, got to corresponding with Matt Ingalls, who wrote some cool BeOS software for computer/human improvisation back in the day. Turns out that Ingalls now runs the Transbay Creative Music Calendar, and hosts it on Robin Hood for BeOS — the same httpd server that drove betips.net for years. I’m just amazed that there are not only still so many active BeOS users out there, but that there are still BeOS-hosted web sites. Groovy.
* Congrats to ex-Be employee and blogging friend Dan Sandler for being one of the Slashdot T-Shirt contest winners. I really do like Dan’s design the best, and I’m not just saying that.
In November 2001 I had just migrated from BeOS to OS X and was sorely missing the ability of my MP3 player to broadcast my home collection to work (see iTunes Needs Streaming). All the hubbub surrounding the new iTunes music store has eclipsed the news that it’s finally possible to do exactly that. I’m sitting at work right now listening to my home MP3s, and haven’t dropped a frame in two hours. All 16,000 tracks are immediately available, with all the usual search functionality. All my playlists (both standard and “smart”) are available. I’m in hog heaven.
If you set sharing on in the prefs, you can also provide a direct link into any point in your collection — Cmd-Click and select Copy URL. philm points out that it’s also possible to link to specific items in the iTunes store. Check these examples.
One for the BeOS folks: Steve Sakoman has just made the round-robin from Apple to Be to Palm and back to Apple. Sakoman was always my favorite Be executive. Brilliant man and great programmer, but he also had a wonderfully kind, avuncular manner. He once told me that he bought a copy of every piece of shareware that emerged for BeOS, just to support the development community. How many high-level execs out there think that way? Question now is, will the next version of Mac OS include a port of the CodyCam?
Long after the flavor’s gone, I’ve decided to turn betips.net over to someone else. This is kind of a hard decison – many hundreds of unpaid hours have gone into the site, and it served as a test-bed for some cool things, like TrackerBase. For a couple of years it was one of very few full-time servers running BeOS on the Internet. These days the site is all PHP/MySQL under OS X, but I haven’t touched the content for ages… just keep it around because it’s nice to have a domain at my fingertips for file transfer, etc. But I’ve got other ideas for that now, and this really should be in the hands of someone who lives and breathes BeOS. Let me know if you’re interested in hosting – shacker at birdhouse org.
