OSUser: BeOS Journal #13 - It's Dark in the Box

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BeOS Journal #13: It's Dark in the Box Scot Hacker, ZDNet 08/04/97 It's no secret -- the Be community has pretty much known for a long time that a port of the BeOS to Intel-based processors was in the works. In fact, Be has made oblique reference to the fact that their operating system is "processor agnostic" on numerous occassions at developers' conferences and online. We all knew that the system was designed from the ground up to be highly portable -- after all, that's why the OS was ported from the BeBox to Mac hardware so easily before the beloved BeBox was discontinued. But that port seemed like less of a stretch, since both the BeBox and PowerMacs run on RISC-based processors. Today, Be officially announced for the first time that BeOS is running on Intel-based processors. They're demonstrating BeOS for Intel at MacWorld right now, on a dual-processor machine, and they say they've got it running on a quad-CPU system back at the offices in Menlo Park. Whether a move to x86 is wise for Be, however, has been a subject of much debate in the various Be-related fora. Because there's a very large contingency of the Mac faithful amongst Be fans, there has been a lot of resistance to the very notion of an x86 port, for "religious," technical, and economic reasons. Every time the question came up in one of the comp.sys.be newsgroups or on the beusergroup mailing list, the notion was widely rebutted, usually with the following arguments given: BeOS is an immature system, with much work still to be poured into it. An x86 port makes sense in the big picure, but not now. The system needs to be made rock-solid in its present incarnation before undertaking a port. Be is a small company with limited resources, and needs to use all the energy at its disposal to perfect what it's working on before taking valuable talent away from the core project to work on x86. The world of Mac hardware is tightly controlled. We know very well the specifications for the set of motherboards and I/O controllers that are out there, so it's much easier to send the OS into the public and have some guarantee that it will work. The x86 world is an entirely different scene: there are tens of thousands of hardware configurations out there, and not even OS/2 or NT have the drivers neeeded to talk to all that hardware. How can Be hope to satisfy the needs of the millions? PowerPC chips are superior to CISC chips. They're inherently faster (save for the instruction caching shortcomings of most current PPC systems), and have more of a future. x86, many argue with good evidence, is headed toward the end of its useful lifespan. These are all valid considerations, but they all miss one important point: Be Inc. is a business. A business that has been running off venture capital for years without turning a dime in profit, and that has to change soon. Already, rumors are beginning to circulate that funding is low and that a new round of VC is being sought. The marketshare of x86 users out there is what? Ten times larger than the PowerPC market? And the PPC market is getting smaller all the time. You crunch the numbers. It's pretty obvious. Not only that, but with Rhapsody preparing to run on x86, there will soon be less incentive than ever before for new computer buyers to purchase Macs or Mac clones. That's a shame, because Mac hardware is excellent hardware, but it's a fact of life, and any CEO who can't see that one coming is blind. Jean-Louis Gasse's eyes are wide open. So everyone fully expected that an x86 version of BeOS would hit the streets eventually -- we just didn't expect it so soon. But now that the other shoe has dropped, Intel users will finally have a state-of-the-art operating system to use as an alternative to the bogged-down dinosaur OSs of today. Is the x86 port tantamount to a betrayal of Mac users everywhere? No. This is an independent OS company with no ties to Apple. Be makes a portable OS and that's a good thing. Hardcore Mac loyalists whose chief complaint is that Windows sucks should be happy that those users now have an excellent alternative -- one that's also easy to install, super powerful, flexible, fast, and fun. Will BeOS run poorly on x86 machines because of inferior hardware? No. Even though Mac hardware is arguably superior in many ways, the user experience is dictated almost entirely by a combination of the software running on those systems and the overall responsiveness of the hardware/OS combination. That putty-colored shell around your computer is, for most people, an impenetrable wall. All that matters is that you get your work done without the OS getting in your way. A gentleman named Joseph Palmer was one of the lead hardware engineers at Be. He's responsible for the majority of the design of the BeBox, including the extinct GeekPort ™. He was also an Apple employee for a long time. There's an article by Palmer that I found very illuminating. It's Dark in the Box chronicles Palmer's awakening to the fact that, in the end, it matters very little how a motherboard is configured, or how serial ports are wired. What matters is what the user sees on-screen, how responsive a machine is, and how much thought has gone into the design. Everything else is just icing on the cake for the geeks. It really is "dark in the box" (More of Palmer's insightful writings can be found here). The decision to push ahead with a port of BeOS to Intel is a good one, and means that Be's chances for prosperity are magnified by at least an order of magnitude (assuming there are at least ten times more Pentium boxes floating around out there than PowerMacs and their clones). More money for Be means a better operating system for you, no matter what kind of box you choose to run it on. |
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