this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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This was a decent OS, came about in BeOS 5 when they started to run on intel. Just lacked apps. at least OS/4 Warp could run Windows apps, this was just a brand new OS with nothing yet. Shame it died out, but you can run an inspired version of it called Haiku.
Yep. I ran it on my 450MHz Pentium III back in the day - was incredibly fast and felt so ahead of it's time, especially it's multimedia and multitasking performance, as well as the fast boot speeds. It was my second favorite OS back then.
As it was explained to me, it could do full-motion video almost 30 years ago, it could switch around analog signals like cable TV and put them on screen in an app, it had ports for hardware hacking that you could control more low-level and directly. It was just better, by quite a lot. And Microsoft and network effects conspired to kill it before it got rooted and so it got thrown out with the trash.
Not only could it do full motion video, but it could, on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, rotate an OpenGL cube on any axis with a different video running on all six sides, and do so smoothly and without any lag or video stuttering. It was incredible what they were able to do back then. Hell I'm not entirely convinced Windows could pull that off now!