Founded in 1990, Be originally marketed its BeOS operating system on its proprietary hardware platform the BeBox. The BeBox went the way of the dinosaurs, however, and the company officially ceased to
Founded in 1990, Be originally marketed its BeOS operating system on its proprietary hardware platform the BeBox. The BeBox went the way of the dinosaurs, however, and the company officially ceased to support it as of 1 January 2000. BeOS is now sold as a standalone OS, with both PowerPC and Intel versions available and is currently up to version 4.5. The main advantage of BeOS, according to its designers, is that it was designed from the ground up, with the power of modern hardware users and the applications of modern users specifically in mind. The layers of legacy code are stripped away to enable the software to maximise the available power of
the hardware.
A central tenet of the system is its native support for multiple processors, known as pervasive multithreading. Unlike Windows NT, apps dont have to be specifically written to take advantage of multiple processors - its inherent to the OS. The Pulse applet supplied with the OS allows you to demonstrate this by switching CPUs on and off on the fly. Second on the list of features is the 64-bit filing system that gives a vast addressing capability and the ability to handle terabyte-length files. In addition, Be claims this lean, mean system boots up in 20 seconds, which is borne out in practice.
However, once the initial optimism has worn off, youre left with a technically advanced OS that, as yet, cant really do much. In comparison to Windows, the range of applications available for BeOS is tiny, and there are few major software houses that have publicly committed to developing for the system - as far as most developers are concerned, the alternative OS of the moment is Linux. Be is aware of this fact, of course, and developers who test the waters will find that its exceptionally easy to develop BeOS applications. The OS comes with its own integrated development environment, BeIDE, and has an implementation of GNU C++ with API classes, plus Perl included as standard, and documentation is plentiful and largely free.
Its hard to make a comprehensive speed comparison between BeOS and NT Workstation. The only application available for both platforms at the time of writing is the 3D modelling and rendering package Blender (www.blender.nl). Results from tests are disappointing, however. On a dual-Pentium III system, with both CPUs enabled, rendering one of Blenders demonstration scenes at high resolution, with oversampling and shadows switched on, took 49 seconds under BeOS. Switching off the second processor and running the test again resulted in a time of 78 seconds.
Impressive on the face of it - at least it shows that the multithreading works. But booting into NT 4 Workstation on the same machine and performing exactly the same render with the same settings took just 31 seconds, and thats using just the one processor. Blender isnt specifically a multithreading app, so its affiliated to one CPU on an NT system. The reason for this performance discrepancy isnt that NT is twice as fast as BeOS: it all comes down to OS support. The compiler used to build the NT version probably has more efficient optimisation, the devices in the test PC use NT drivers that no doubt have had more time lavished on them and so on. But it shows that popular support for an OS goes a long way to masking the drawbacks for the end user.
BeOS is billed as a digital media and Internet OS, but its hard to take these claims seriously when it cant yet play MP3 files or DVDs, or run Java applets or applications straight from the box. The current version has no support for IEEE1394 either. These problems are being rectified as we speak, of course, but the root problem of support lag caused by a small user base wont disappear soon.
The state of play currently dictates that BeOS is little more than a curiosity. With the vast plethora of devices available for the Intel platform, obtaining proper driver support is impossible unless manufacturers write them as a matter of course when producing new products. Given that a lot of them dont even bother with decent NT drivers, this is little more than a pipe dream. This is frustrating, because its obvious that BeOS bears the foundations of an immensely powerful platform. Anyone who wants to learn to program without the frustration of dealing with the Win32 API should get a copy immediately, but for the rest of us BeOSs time has yet to come.