Steve And The BeOS - Jan. 5th, 1997
- Be at Macworld
- Boot Problems
- New File System Information
- VirtualMac
- Query Problem Update
- User Responses
Be had a very impressive showing at this weeks Macworld Exposition trade show in San Francisco, California.
Be was present in their own booth in the South Hall as well as in Power Computing's mammoth booth in the North Hall.
Be was showing DR8.2 on Power Computing's new dual 225mhz 604e screaming deamons (Dual Hogs I call em) from hell with Twin Turbo 128 video card machines.
Wholey Moley.
Be showed a 3D book model where you could turn the pages by dragging them, all in 3D. Then you could map images or movies onto the pages and they would play while turning the pages!
They then whipped out a cube and while spinning in 3D added images to two sides, movies to another two and live video feeds of the crowds to the final two, all playing, all rotating, using only about 50% of the dual hogs power.
Be always had a crowd of gawkers at its site and to be honest, there was much more interest in the BeOS than in Apple's NeXTStep, mainly because Be is running today.
A rumor from the show floor that was running amuck was that Adobe was near done of a version of Photoshop 4 for BeOS. If this is indeed the case, and Photoshop takes advantage of those dual hogs, Be has an instant market potential. Anyone in their right mind working in Photoshop would have to take a look at that Adobe and Be cooked up - I can see it saving serious Photoshop users hundreds of hours.
And you can read your email while its rotating that 100 megabyte image I would venture to speculate. :)
The other night I had the boot problems I wrote about on 1/3/96. Booting into BeOS via the extension would bring up the Be Bootstrap but the keyboard would be dead.
I tried my own solution of holding down the power key but that didn't work at all. I finally gave up. This morning, it booted fine. It must have known I needed sleep and refused to start up for my own good.
According to some folks I talked to, the next BeOS release, DR9 will include a complete file system rewrite.
One person noted that emails, people records, etc would no longer be stored directly into the database but rather as files within the database. The approach should make it the possibility of losing all of your email in a database rebuild a faint memory.
fredlabs, Inc. demonstrated VirtualMac wherever the BeOS was demonstrated. This is the apparent Mac emulator the rags wrote about.
It ran Excel and Word, but something is sitting wrong in my belly. For example, the developers were quoted to something of the effect that QuickTime(tm) might be ported later. If VirtualMac is a Macintosh virtual Machine, whats to port for QuickTime? Shouldn't it just work?
When the Mac booted, a QuickTime icon showed up in the row of icons, but nobody could tell me why. :)
VirtualMac has a long way to go before I'd be dumping MacOS for it. But, in the meantime, to run that basic app that you really need to use, it may be an interesting solution.
I reported that name queries were broken, and they kind of are. It turns out that query searching, such as in the name of a user, is case sensitive. This is bad and I don't know if DR9's new file system will fix this or not.
Mike reports that he and his brother have been using the PowerMac Dr8.2 release with no problems. Jose Nazario mentioned that he too has had little problems, except with a game called beboulder.
Several users asked about the 6 processor 604e machine I talked about. Sorry, it was just an example of how the BeOS could scale to such a achine if it indeed existed.
Many people wrote to say that I used the gunzip command instead of tar in the last example of my compression topic on 1/3/97. I know, but it points out just why we need a GUI decompression application.
John said that BeOS does have a Clean Up By Name command. " Hold down control and select the menu.." I have not verified this, or it could be the option key.
I've already got reposnses from Be QA asking about the crashes (they have never seen them) Pretty responsive folks over there.
© Copyright 1997-2002 Geeks R Us. Graphics by Andrew Duncan.
