BeOS Gaining Ground

By Scott Lehman
slehman@harmony-central.com

October 20, 1998

Have you ever been frustrated using your Mac or Windows computer for making music? Disappointed with the audio and MIDI latencies? Or having a single Mac program crash the entire computer? Does your system just not seem up to doing complex multimedia processing? Well, there are alternatives you can consider. I've been following one such alternative, the BeOS, for the last two years or so. The potential of it is really quite impressive, but it is still very much a product under development. Even so, there are already a number of audio and music applications available that you can use today.

What is it?

The basic BeOS desktop. (Click for a full-size image)

The BeOS is a completely new operating system (OS), designed from the ground up specifically for multimedia applications. Be, the company that created it, calls it a media OS. It is not a form of UNIX although it does offer POSIX compatibility (though not guaranteed to be full compliance yet.) It incorporates quite a few technologies that people talk about these days - protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multi-processing, multi-threading, and a 64-bit journaling file system. Some have suggested that BeOS actually stands for "Buzzword enabled Operating System" because of all these features.

So what do all the features mean to the musician using his or her computer? A very responsive and stable system. A window's contents are drawn while you move or resize the window. When a program crashes, the system notifies you and lets you keep on working. Since Be built their OS from scratch, they aren't in a position where they have to provide backwards compatibility with earlier, more limiting releases like Windows 98 does. With its 64-bit file system, the OS can easily deal with huge disk drives you may need to store high-quality audio on. Seeing a BeOS system pass a stress test with flying colors is truly an amazing sight when done properly. If you get that chance to see a demo, I highly recommend it.

Be considers their operating system to be "processor agnostic." They originally started working with AT&T's Hobbit processor, then moved to PowerPC with their own hardware platform, the dual processor BeBox. Be then took their operating system to PowerMac machines. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Be was founded and is staffed by number of ex-Apple employees.) And most recently, BeOS has made the transition to Intel processors. Be remains committed to supporting the PowerPC platform through the next two releases. After that, they will end or continue PowerPC support based on customer demand.

So what does Be plan to do with Microsoft already owning most of the desktops out there? They have no expectation of pushing Windows into obscurity. Rather than trying to replace Windows, they plan to peacefully coexist with Windows and other operating systems. If you need to do some serious multimedia work, boot into BeOS. When you need Office or some productivity app, you can boot back to Windows. It sounds simple, but how many people are willing to dual boot? If the BeOS applications are compelling enough, maybe quite a few.

I took a look at BeOS R3 (Release 3) and 3.2 on both a 400 MHz Pentium II system with AGP graphics (and a technically unsupported motherboard) and a 604e based PowerMac 8600/300 (which is also technically an unsupported machine, but BeOS seems to function properly on it.) When I got my copy, it included both the Intel and PowerPC versions.

I'm not going to try to compare the performance of the Intel and PowerPC versions. It's not really meaningful at this point as R3 is the first release for Intel. The PowerPC version has been under development longer and is somewhat more optimized. All I will say is this: using the game of Life as a crude performance test, the PowerMac barely edged out the Pentium II system. As an example of the room left for improvement on the Intel side of things, someone rewrote a PCI graphics driver that doubled graphics speed in some cases, which could put a Pentium II system well ahead of the Mac. Things will definitely get better with the next Intel release.