Well win95 was a gigantic improvement to the piece of garbage called win3.11 that came on five (5) floppy discs. The first Tomb Raider game came out for win95 and the hardware accelerated 3d was taking it's baby steps on the platform. In fact, Tomb Raider looked so good that I invested in 133mhz amd pc just to play it. I think it was one of the first games that didn't look blocky and horrible and only 4 years after atari Falcon had failed (or atari failed the falcon), the PC had indeed caught up and did something that actually didn't look like cga-legobricks jittering. Nice one.
The only puzzling thing was that now that tech has moved on, why did win95 stutter with basic tasks like playing back video? Well of course win95 was only designed to store spreadsheets and cake recipies but I wondered is there anything that can do things better than win95. The answer came to me in like 1997 when I discovered this thing called BeOS. It was featured very briefly in a computer magazine and had a picture of a terribly expensive computer called BeBox. Bebox.. it sounds almost as sexy as the Nexus system in the Pepe Deluxe-video. Dual cpu's, that's SMP for home, simply put, blew my mind that instant. But the Bebox was way too expensive so I had to stick with win95, trumpet winsock and ifranWiev. And slowly loading images of a bebox that was running '2 Power PC 603e's running at 133MHz'. Ah well.
The change came in 1998 when BeOS was released for x86. Apple had got their wayward son Steve back and Steve brought in some old residual from his company NEXT (If you ever wonder why your mac is showing the beach ball, just google NEXT to get to the root of the problem). I view bringing in the Next stuff was just Steve's ego trip to justify a piece of crap he'd been working on for a few years. BeOS would have been the perfect thing for apple back then, lightyears ahead of competition. Let me illustrate.
In 1998 when x86 BeOS came out, I went to great lengths to actually see it on a dual cpu box. My work desktop was a dual slot pentium 2 with only one cpu (I have no idea why I had been bought one) so there was a problem of one missing CPU. So for my SMP kicks, I had to stay late at work, wait until this other guy had gone home, open his P2 box and transfer his cpu into mine. A few bios settings and boom, I booted into a dual processor BeOS experience. And what an experience it was.
I could browse the net, play AND rip mp3's and install system updates At The Same Time! And saw two processor bars jumping up and down instead of just one. It was amazing. Apps wouldn't freeze on system load, no beach balls or sandglasses, everything just worked. Then I knew there actually people who can design operating systems. I remember when we had an engineer from DEC visiting, I showed him how to sort 16.000 files with a single click of a mouse in Real Time. He was very surprised that all this happened on a simple dual cpu pentium 2. His only comment was 'I think 16.000 files in the same folder are a very bad idea' and off he flew to this mystical mental plane all DEC engineers possessed during the past millenium. Anyway late in the evening it was time to secretly return the workmates CPU and go home and do it again the next day. =)
In 1998 linux was on it's way in with it's dreary, jittery x-windowing thing and the clever kids were getting into it. For me, the whole thing smelled the same as the old manuals for DEC VAXes from the 1970's but in a bad way, after all, this is IT and it's 1998 already, hello!
As it happened, because of Microsofts monopoly manouvers (Be sued them and won but too little, too late) and Steve's egotrip Next being chosen to replace the volatile mac OS whatever, BeOS disappeared after 2001. OS's have moved on, Apple, mentally crippled by Next heritage, chose a logical successor for NEXT in freeBSD. What a waste of energy for one mans ego trip. Anyway, for his merit Steve rescued his company from becoming another Be and we can still enjoy using great looking computers and some kind of cohesive approach that Apple enforces and protects with a great vigilance and furious anger. Even linux doesn't look like the piece of syphilitic dog's vomit it used to look like, ubuntu has a great look nowadays and it's great for play-one-video-file-at-the time-approach of desktop computing.
But what fun was BeOS. The good part of it all is that BeOS is not dead! It's still alive as Haiku OS that's being maintained and developed and they've just got a new alphaR1 out so you can test it yourself by installing haiku on a usb-stick, boot your pc with it and see the wonder. Check it out!
Sami
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