BeOS : The Free Multimedia Operating System
Introduction Computers have come a long way since their invention. From the intimidating ENIAC with its pitifully low computational capacity to the latest core 2 duo based laptops, computers have evolved to become much more functional and powerful. The evolution of computer hardware has also necessitated a change in the software required to run these systems. The primary software required to run the hardware is the Operating System. Over the years, the evolution of the OS has resulted in a much more productive and user friendly systems which can be customized to suit the users exact needs and requirements accurately. However the evolution of the operating system is much deeper than just the practical definition, as a closer look on the history of operating systems will give us the picture of the transition of the philosophical outlook of the operating the system: the change in the outlook of both the users and the developers towards the operating system and the emergence of the operating system as the central icon of the free software revolution. This paper tries to analyze this change in perspective towards usability in operating systems from the viewpoints of both the user and the developer. A Tryst with History The earliest computer systems came with hardwired operating systems which resided on a separate chip soldered on to the main circuit board of the computer. The operating systems were highly specialized and were designed to perform specific tasks on very specific hardware. They were single user and single task operating systems. Memory management was done manually by the user executed programs. The operating system had very less functionality, was not at all user friendly and was not customizable at all. The demand for more powerful systems led to an increase in the customizability of the operating system further increasing the functionality of the system. It was still very user unfriendly and expected the user of the system to understand advanced computer
architecture concepts like memory management and allocation, job queuing and scheduling etc. Further developments over the years included multi user systems and multi tasking. The graphical user interface was virtually the last component to be developed which forms and integral part of any modern operating system, Ideas like memory management, multi tasking , user management, security, networking, multimedia became accepted norms of any operating system available today. At this juncture in time, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs decided to sell low powered DIY kits of computers to home users. This idea caught on well and the two men were credit ...
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architecture concepts like memory management and allocation, job queuing and scheduling etc. Further developments over the years included multi user systems and multi tasking. The graphical user interface was virtually the last component to be developed which forms and integral part of any modern operating system, Ideas like memory management, multi tasking , user management, security, networking, multimedia became accepted norms of any operating system available today. At this juncture in time, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs decided to sell low powered DIY kits of computers to home users. This idea caught on well and the two men were credit with the invention of the home computer. Around the same time two friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided to sell operating systems. Selling computer hardware was onething, after all the hardware is real and physical, but selling computer software was another story. However almost 22 years later bill gates and paul allen are amongst the richest people on earth. The computer software is the most essential requirement for any computer system. Without the software the hardware would just not run. Microsoft revolutionarised the operating system. Their first operating system was the DOS or the disk operating system. Microsoft did not actually develop the operating system, instead they bought and already existing operating system called QDOS – quick and dirty operating system from another firm. They modified this OS, renamed it MSDOS and sold it to IBM. IBM had been looking for an operating system for their newer desktop computers it called IBM-PC or the IBM personal computer. IBM first approached apple to purchase apple’s operating system distributed with their macintosh computers. However apple had refused the offer forcing IBM to turn to Microsoft. Its interesting to note that at this point in history if apple had accepted IBM’s offer, we would have been using apple’s operating systems instead of Microsoft’s. It is also interesting to note that IBM had its own operating system called CP/M which was far advanced than most of the operating systems of its generations, however IBM still chose to go to a third party vendor for the operating system, and the resultant MSDOS 1.0 derived from QDOS has many striking resemblances to IBM’s CP/M operating system. MSDOS was further developed into Windows. The original Windows was just a GUI shell running over the Command Line Interface DOS. However starting with Windows 2000 the GUI is the fully functional user interface and the command line interface has been added for legacy application support. Multi user and multi tasking has been improved and is now an integral part of all operating systems available today. At this point of time operating systems began to evolve in a different way. There were the big customizable general purpose operating systems like windows, Mac OS and Linux. These OSes were not specialized to perform any specific task and were designed to be as user friendly and customizable as possible, In the wake of much more user friendly developer tools and object oriented programming tools, many application specific operating systems started popping up like BeOS , QNX, FreeDOS , DragonOS, AmigaOS etc. these were small, user and community driven projects. These were targeted at performing some very specific functions. Some were oriented towards server specific application , other were developed to be multimedia operating systems, others were embedded operating systems and some others were just some interesting projects. In the wake of all these projects, some ideas more popular than the others. Since these ideas were user driven, they were most often made open source allowing users to customize the functionality and develop their own versions. The idea of a common hardware independent programming standard was now common to most operating systems and was termed at the OS API or application programming interface. It allowed the programmers to write programs designed to work on a specific operating system by making OS interrupt calls designed to perform a specific hardware related task which was common to the hardware device even of different configuration or version. This meant that the developer didn’t have to concern himself with the hardware configuration of the system. This was because the operating system handled all the hardware device based calls, functions and interrupts. BeOS : The Free Multimedia Operating System BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. Unlike some other operating systems of the time, BeOS was written to take advantage of modern hardware. Optimized for digital media work, BeOS made full use of multiprocessor systems by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a custom 64-bit journaled file system known as BFS. The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design. The API was written in C++ for ease of programming. It has POSIX compatibility and access to a command line interface through the bash shell, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system. BeOS was positioned as a platform which could be used by a substantial population of desktop users and a competitor to MS-Windows and Linux. However, it was ultimately unable to achieve a significant market share and proved commercially unviable for Be Inc. The company was acquired by Palm Inc. and today BeOS is mainly used and developed by a small population of enthusiasts. Despite the end of Be Inc, BeOS remains popular among devoted followers. The BeOS community still develops free software and has even released patches, drivers and various updates to BeOS. The main source of BeOS-related software can be found at BeBits. The BeOS user interface was notable at the time for being almost completely unthemeable, even with third party hacks. The BeOS theme of yellow, changing length tabs on the top of windows, and relatively plain grey interface widgets was enforced. This UI remained relatively unchanged from 1995, but had been completely overhauled by the time of the leaked Dano release. An Easter egg in the OS allowed changing the title bar look-and-feel to a few others (Mac OS 8, Amiga, and Windows 98 appearances) and in Dano, this had been extended to be a feature allowing changing of the title bar and scroll bars. No other interface widgets could be changed. There is a pre-Dano third party program WindowShade that allows the colors of the title bar and window frame to be changed, but the appearance remained the same. ZetaOS: The Commercial Fiasco ZETA OS is an effort to bring BeOS up to date, adding support for newer hardware, and features that had been introduced in other operating systems in the years since Be Incorporated ceased development in 2001. Among the new features are USB 2.0 support, SATA support, samba support, a new media player, and enhanced localization of system components. Unlike Haiku and other open source efforts to recreate some or all of BeOS's functionality from scratch, ZETA is based on the actual BeOS code base, and it is closed source. ZETA has contributed to an increase in activity in the BeOS commercial software market, with a number of new products for both ZETA and the earlier BeOS being released.mHowever, some critics point to a list of goals for the first release that do not appear to have been met (including Java 1.4.2 and ODBC support). Other reviewers point to bugs that still exist from BeOS, and question whether yellowTAB has the complete access to the source code they would need to make significant updates. The system has also come under heavy criticism from BeOS developers for undocumented changes in the system messaging system. These changes can break compilation of code, and in some cases (most notably Mozilla), break the actual application if any code optimizations are applied, resulting in much slower builds. Zeta Os inherited most of the code from BeOS. The later acquirer of Palmsource which had bought BE Inc stopped magnussoft from distributing the software. Therefore zeta is as incomplete as BeOS was. Zeta API system is largely inherited from BeOS though there were several modifications, some even which made the code unstable.
