1
Introduction to the
BeOS and BFS
1.1
History Leading Up to BFS
In late 1990 Jean Louis Gass ´ee founded Be, Inc., to address the shortcomings
he saw in operating systems of the time. He perceived that the problem most
operating systems shared was that they were weighed down with the baggage
of many years of legacy. The cost of this legacy was of course performance:
the speed of the underlying hardware was not being fully exploited.
To solve that problem, Be, Inc., began developing, from scratch, the BeOS
and the BeBox. The original BeBox used two AT&T Hobbit CPUs and three
DSP chips. A variety of plug-in cards for the box provided telephony, MIDI,
and audio support. The box was moderately low cost and offered impressive
performance for the time (1992). During the same time period, the BeOS
evolved into a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) OS that supported virtual
memory, preemptive multitasking, and lightweight threading. User-level
servers provided most of the functionality of the system, and the kernel re-
mained quite small. The primary interface to the BeOS was through a graph-
ical user interface reminiscent of the Macintosh. Figure 1-1 shows the BeOS
GUI.
The intent for the Hobbit BeBox was that it would be an information de-
vice that would be connected to a network, could answer your phone, and
worked well with MIDI and other multimedia devices. In retrospect the orig-
inal design was a mix of what we now call a "network computer" (NC) and a
set-top box of sorts.
The hardware design of the original BeBox met an unfortunate end when
AT&T canceled the Hobbit processor in March 1994. Reworking the design
to use more common parts, Be modified the BeBox to use the PowerPC chip,
which, at the time (1994), had the most promising future. The redesigned box
1
Practical File System Design:The Be File System
, Dominic Giampaolo
page 1