Josh Haberman

Things I’d do if I had more time, entry #417:

Find out why BeOS R5 doesn’t boot on qemu and fix it. It runs fine if you get it booted (or so Michael Crawford, from the link, claims), it just can’t boot off the CD!

Why? BeOS is still the only desktop environment I’ve used that is responsive. By “responsive” I mean “has a GUI that doesn’t start getting sluggish or spinning a beach ball when it gets busy.” It’s a travesty that in 2009, you can still make almost any browser grind to a halt by simply visiting a 100MB file (haven’t tried Chrome, so maybe it’s the exception). The whole GUI freezes just because there’s a bunch of data getting downloaded and parsed!

BeOS wasn’t like that. On circa-2000 hardware it was more responsive than any environment I’ve used before or since.

It’s the one piece of evidence I have that GUIs don’t have to be these sluggish beasts.

And I want to relive it.