Dear Final Debug: I’m a recovering Macintosh developer. I’ve had to move to NT (I’m not happy about this, folks), but my heart is still in Cupertino. I was a big fan of Jean Louis-Gassee when he was at Apple, and I followed his work in the trade press when he founded Be. Be was the frontrunner to develop the next generation of the Apple OS, but they lost out to Steve Jobs’ NeXT Inc. What are they doing now? — Garry West, town not listed.
Final Debug Responds: Garry, Gassee was one flashy figure at Apple. He was one of the executives who argued strenuously against opening up the Apple OS, which made it particularly amusing last year when it looked like his new company might be the one to rescue Apple under Gil Amelio. But the price Gassee asked for was reported to be several hundred million dollars too much for Amelio, who was soon to give the cash (and his job) to Steve Jobs.
As you’d expect, the company, chastened or not, has been relatively quiet since then. Its press releases, once brash, are now low-key affairs that publicize modest undertakings like bundling deals with Umax and Metroworks. Increasingly, the company is pushing its BeOS for high-end multimedia developers, rather than as a general-use operating system. In March, it released a version of BeOS that works on Intel Pentium systems; we have been tasting that version, R3, here at Silicon Prairie and we’re impressed by its speed, if not its reliability. As you’d expect from a new operating system with a small user base, there are relatively few strong applications available for BeOS, though those few do take advantage of some of the operating system’s most-heralded features:
-Symmetric multiprocessing — It can spread its work among multiple processors.
-Pervasive multithreading — It breaks applications into hundreds of tiny tasks that can be distributed among the processors.
-64-bit file system — The disk size can exceed one terabyte (Alas, we don’t have enough hard-disk space to check this.)
-Multithreaded graphics and I/O system –This allows for very fast 3D and 2D graphics work.
You can find out more about the BeOS here. It’s quite interesting technically; we’ll see whether the market needs such a product.
Windows 98 answer
At presstime, it’s unclear when Windows 98 will come out, and in what form. But we do have experts on the Windows of 10 years ago, as evidenced by the suprising response to our recent Microsoft Windows history question. We received more than 100 responses, more than half of them correct or close enough for the budges. The question was:
What was the main difference between Windows/286 and Windows/386?
The first correct answer arrived from D. McElwain, who wrote:
“The main difference between Windows/286 and Windows/386 is the availability of the ‘386 enhanced’ operating mode. The ‘386 enhanced’ mode provides access to the virtual memory capability of the 80386 processor, so that Windows applications can use more memory than is physically available. This mode also makes it possible to multitask and run DOS applications in a window.”
This timely and correct answer wins D. a copy of Symantec Visual Java. Come back next week for a new contest.
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