To Be, or not to Be. Finally, it was not to Be.
I first heard of BeOS from Click Online (now called Click) on BBC World. The demo — several audio tracks and videos being played simultaneously and rapid resizing/dragging the windows — was mind-blowing. On a Pentium II. Yes, I didn't quite believe the demo. How is it that if software could be written to run so fast was Microsoft, the multi-billion dollar giant, unable to produce an OS half as good? Oh, those were the ignorant days!
I downloaded the 50MB BeOS Lite on dialup with a 56Kbps modem and without a download manager. After several days of botched download attempts, which included others in the house who ordered me to disconnect because they needed to make phone calls, and aggravating days of failed download attempts, it took me half a day or more to completely download the file on the last attempt.
I installed the other-worldly BeOS on my computer, which ran with a 166MHz Pentium MMX with 64MB RAM and a 2GB HDD, expecting disappointment. And disappoint it did but not in terms of performance. The OS didn't have the proper drivers for my graphics card and couldn't display colour but the performance was way better than Windows 98 I had used until then. Browsing files were faster. Opening and switching between applications were snappier. Stephen Cole was right after all. I found new respect for BBC (for showing me BeOS) and operating systems.
On that day, I would have bet my manhood on BeOS being the future of operating systems. They just had to write more drivers. Looking back, I'm lucky not to have made that bet. My manhood is still intact. BeOS is not. There is a resurrection though in the form of Haiku but not worth taking bets on yet.
Even though BeOS didn't really gain much traction, there were plenty of brilliant ideas that sprouted with Be. The Be Filesystem (BFS) is one of them. Here is one of them (quoted from Ars Technica):
One of BFS's most important and widely touted features is its support for extended attributes. An example of the importance of attributes is illustrated with an example of MP3 files. Information fields important to an MP3 file would be: song title, band, album, release date, encoding rate, length, number of times played. If you want to associate this information with each MP3 file using a conventional file system, you might have to create your own database to support searching, creating, updating, or deleting these attributes as your music collection grows and changes. With BFS, in contrast, these attributes, or any other attributes, can be added to the file system itself. This means that a program for editing or playing MP3s does not need to create or maintain a database, because the file system will handle these functions for you. BFS supports associating attributes with a file, either under program control or from the command line. Attributes can be searched and sorted by the file system, as an extension of any application.
I recommend the full article: The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective.
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