BeOS Demo Video
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters use it to show how responsive BeOS was on very modest hardware compared with Windows and Mac of the era.
What it is
A vintage demo video of the BeOS operating system running on mid-90s hardware. It shows media playback and window manipulation staying smooth at the same time.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2016 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends donatj · 2021-08 · on “Haiku has hired an existing contributor to work on Haiku full-time”
> Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though? Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows or even macOS 11? It's hard to explain these days, but back in the late 90s it was just so far ahead of everything else except maybe NeXT and NeXT was entirely out of reach for 99% of the world. The UI was ridiculously smooth and fast and everything worked together like a well oiled machine. - [this video] Here they play an mp3 and a video that continue to render while you move the windows around, on a 133mhz machine without it even putting up a sweat. Clearly that's nothing today but that was unheard of at the time. Beyond that it had amazing features you still don't see on operating syst
Cites nickpsecurity · 2016-02 · on “What “Worse is Better vs. The Right Thing” is really about (2012)”
He beat me to it as I'm mentally working on a similar essay. Backward compatibility and shipping pressure I already covered a lot in my posts on Schneier's blog elaborating on this. See Steve Lipner's Ethics of Perfection essay for a great take on "ship first, fix later" mentality. He had previously done a high-assurance, secure VMM. So, he had been on both sides. [LINK] On backward compatibility, you need to explore lock-in and network effects. These are the strongest drivers of the revenues of the biggest tech firms. Once you get the market with shipping, people will start building on top of and around your solution. They get stuck with it after they do that enough to make it hard to move.
Cites ksherlock · 2024-04 · on “How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?”
That wasn't a hardware limitation. BeOS was outperforming Windows and Mac on the same hardware. If JLG hadn't demanded too much money, Apple would have merged with BeOS (and probably be a distant memory by now but that's a separate issue) [this video]