Registered: Oct 2000
Location:
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Palm buys Be!

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Originally posted by foo fighter

Ha! Bet Gassee really regrets turning down that 125 million offer from Apple now. 11 mil is chump change compared to that.

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Registered: Dec 2000
Location: Elkins Park, Pa
Posts: 577

Um, sorry for playing the stupid game, but, what does this mean to me, student, or anybody else who doesn't entirely understand what you are talking about?

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Registered: Oct 2000
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quote:

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Originally posted by ernieba1
Um, sorry for playing the stupid game, but, what does this mean to me, student, or anybody else who doesn't entirely understand what you are talking about?

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Not stupid at all.

Be was started about a decade ago by ex-Apple folks to make a very sophisticated, easy-to-use, multi-tasking OS. They made a really nice product with an emphasis on portability between processor types and multimedia. The problem was that they never really caught on. Recently, they have been working on an embedded version of their OS for Internet appliances. The Sony IA actually uses BeIA (BE OS for Internet appliances). Now, they are at the end of their rope. No money and very few customers, but with a very good, non-standard product.

Enter Palm, who has a commanding market share but needs a more powerful OS for their next generation of products. Palm has been working on Palm OS 5 that will run on ARM based processors. This is the same CPU that is in the IPAQ. It is many time more powerful than the processors that are in the current Palms. The goal for Palm is to develop a multitasking, multithreaded OS with multimedia capabilities. The new OS also needs to have a compatibility mode that will allow it to run existing Palm apps. Oh yeah, did I mention that they need it in the fall of 2002? This is a huge and nearly impossible task.

So Palm buys Be. Suddenly they have an OS that meets most of their requirements: multitasking, multithreading, multimedia, robustness. It also has a really cool plug-in filesystem. This means that you can easily replace the filesystem to run on different type of storage devices. In the case of Palm OS, they will probably make it run directly from RAM and OEMs can make plug-in modules to run different types of expansion memory.

The task for Palm is now to port the OS to run on ARM, since today it runs on PPC and x86. They also have to put together a Palm-like UI and create an SDK for us developer folks. Then they can work on a classic Palm OS compatibility mode and create interfaces to the actual hardware that it will be running on.

These remaining tasks seem like a lot of work, but compared to the task of creating an entire OS from scratch, they are trivial.

So what this means to the end-user is that this is the basis of the OS that new Palm OS devices will be running at the end of next year. It also means that Palm now has a chance for long term survival.

The purchase of Be probably also has a lot to do with Alan Kessler (the head of the OS development team) leaving Palm. As I remember, there was serious negotiation about a year ago for Palm to license the EPOC OS (I think, but could have been Symbian - I never figured out what the difference between them is). Kessler objected to this strongly and was given the chance to develop the nextgen OS internally. I would say that todays two stories kind of tell the results of this effort.

I am writing this mostly from memory, so anyone that has more accurate info, please chip in and tell me where I'm wrong (as if I need to say this to you guys).

Registered: Jun 2001
Location: Yes.
Posts: 358

I spent about 5 minutes on the BeOS website without finding any screenshots of the GUI? Does anybody out there have any good links? I did notice a few of the BeOS icons on the sidebar of their page. Now I get where the name for the "BeBop" SilverScreen theme came from.

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Registered: Oct 1999
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Here you go slotmachine!

http://www.ccrb.demon.co.uk/beos/beos_screenshots.htm

As you can see, it's very Mac-like.

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Registered: Oct 1999
Location: I'm not sure, but I see lots of lights everywhere.
Posts: 1287

Here's some more:

http://www.clarkson.edu/~hillbr/beosscreen.htm

http://hermes.spaceports.com/~northjac/Screenshots.htm

At least you get the idea of what the GUI looks like.

One thing that these screenshots do not show is that you can take the tool palette and drag it to the bottom of the screen and make BeOS look exactly like Windows, right down to the start menu. This is one reason why I immediately took to BeOS more so than any other Windows "alternative".

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: The Matrix
Posts: 718

I played around with BeOS when it first came out. Its a sweet OS. I just hope Palm can handle it right and implement the strength of it to the Palm platform properly. This is a good thing but I am worried about Palm blowing it.

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Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:

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Originally posted by foo fighter
At least you get the idea of what the GUI looks like.

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Registered: Nov 2000
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quote:

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Originally posted by bradhaak

Enter Palm, who has a commanding market share but needs a more powerful OS for their next generation of products. Palm has been working on Palm OS 5 that will run on ARM based processors. This is the same CPU that is in the IPAQ. It is many time more powerful than the processors that are in the current Palms. The goal for Palm is to develop a multitasking, multithreaded OS with multimedia capabilities. The new OS also needs to have a compatibility mode that will allow it to run existing Palm apps. Oh yeah, did I mention that they need it in the fall of 2002? This is a huge and nearly impossible task.

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Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Redwood City CA
Posts: 472

It should be very interesting to see how this all plays out. Hopefully, they'll keep compatability with the old Palm OS applications.

Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Greenville, SC
Posts: 172

quote:

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Originally posted by slotmachine
I spent about 5 minutes on the BeOS website without finding any screenshots of the GUI? Does anybody out there have any good links? I did notice a few of the BeOS icons on the sidebar of their page. Now I get where the name for the "BeBop" SilverScreen theme came from.

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Why not try it out? All you have to do is download the Personal Edition of BeOS, and install it like any other Windoze program. It creates a 512MB virtual partition, so there's no partitioning involved on your part. For best results you should create a boot floppy by using the supplied utility. Boot from the floppy and you'll be in BeOS in 15-20 seconds. BeOS supports all Nvidia cards as well as most ATI and Matrox ones. If your card is not supported, it will run in VESA grayscale mode and will be very slow, but a driver download is easy from here
If anyone has any specific questions about hardware compatibility, feel free to ask, or visit this page
As I said in an earlier post, "BeOS is the greatest OS the world has ever seen". Check it out for yourself, it costs nothing for you to use.

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Registered: Oct 2000
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quote:

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Originally posted by Zapp


I don't think they bought Be for porting the PalmOS to ARM processors. At last years PalmSource they demonstrated a prototype ARM based system. They were able to beam PocketChess from a Palm V to the prototype. They had both devices running the same application at the same. BTW, the ARM machine just smoked the Palm V.

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Care to bet??

The demo at palmSource could have been nothing more than a quick and dirty port of the existing Palm OS. Just because something was running on ARM doesn't mean it has anything to do with Palm OS 5. From talking to people at Palm and hanging around with a number of people on the OS team, I can absolutely guarantee that anything that was running in the PalmSource timeframe is not OS 5, since real work hadn't even started then.



I do know that except for a pilot team, the OS dev team was not assigned to the ARM project until last spring when OS 4 was completed. I also know that for a team that size to write a multitasking, multithreaded OS with strong multimedia in less then a year-and-a-half is impossible. If the new OS doesn't have these features, Palm and the entire platform will die.

After the last round of layoffs Palm doesn't have the manpower to work on two OS projects. Getting the new OS out the door next year is Palms only priority. there is no way that they are buying an OS that they can't use for this process.

So let's see, Palm bought an OS that has been recently rewritten for embedded applications. The OS has all of the features that are needed for a product that Palm doesn't have time/resources to develop themselves. Seems pretty clear to me.

Registered: Oct 2000
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Double post

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: I'm not sure, but I see lots of lights everywhere.
Posts: 1287

quote:

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Originally posted by bradhaak
The demo at palmSource could have been nothing more than a quick and dirty port of the existing Palm OS. Just because something was running on ARM doesn't mean it has anything to do with Palm OS 5. From talking to people at Palm and hanging around with a number of people on the OS team, I can absolutely guarantee that anything that was running in the PalmSource timeframe is not OS 5, since real work hadn't even started then.

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Last edited by foo fighter on 08-17-2001 at 09:04 PM

Registered: Nov 2000
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quote:

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Originally posted by bradhaak

Care to bet??

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Registered: Oct 2000
Location:
Posts: 380

quote:

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Originally posted by Zapp

I don't think that Palm ever had any intention of developing the kernel, they would be crazy not to purchase one of the many available (WindRiver comes to mind). We all know that Be doesn't support the ARM at this point (unless they were working on it already -- in which case this is a steal for Palm) and if Palm doesn't have a kernel yet they are in big trouble.

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BeOs was originally written for the 68K, it was then ported and is still available for both x86, and PowerPC. these architectures are incredibly different, so i would hazard a guess that the code is pretty portable. This should not be an issue.

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The demo itself showed that they had a kernel with a PalmOS emulator on top. This is far from OS 5, but it at least implies the kernel.

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It doesn't imply anything, It shows that Palm can write code that can run on the ARM. As I said before, I believe that it was just a port of the existing OS. This is not even a basis for the OS 5 kernel.

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Since you know some Palm engineers, have they actually talked about developing a real-time kernel from scratch? I work on embedded real-time systems and we'd never do something like that for a system of any complexity.ally talked about developing a real-time kernel from scratch? I work on embedded real-time systems and we'd never do something like that for a system of any complexity.

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The talk has been about working on OS 5, not any specific part of it. The key part for me, as I mentioned above, is the resignation of Alan Kessler. he has always been a staunch and public advocate of developing the new OS entirely using internal resources. The fact that his resignation was announced simultaneously with the Be announcement is incredibly revealing.

As I said before, you are wlcome to think that Palm purchased Be for some other reason, but there is really nothing to support any conclusion other than BeIA being the root of Palm OS 5.

Of course I could be completely wrong - stay tuned.

Registered: Nov 2000
Location:
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quote:

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Originally posted by bradhaak

It doesn't imply anything, It shows that Palm can write code that can run on the ARM. As I said before, I believe that it was just a port of the existing OS. This is not even a basis for the OS 5 kernel.

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The demo did actually imply the use of an emulator. By beaming PocketChess to the prototype they showed that they had it running existing 68K code on an ARM processor. Having said that, it simply showed that they had that layer done and not necessarily the kernel.

It would definitely be great to use the Be environment for OS 5 but like you said before, it really makes you wonder about their schedule.

I could see Kessler's departure having to do with the fact that the effort to build everything internally wasn't working out. Once they made their decision on a kernel he would probably not want to stay.

It's definitely going to be an interesting year!

Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Twin Cities, MN
Posts: 1683

quote:

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This is one reason why I'm alway's critical of Palm's development efforts, or lack thereof. Palm seems to drag its feet in building its next generation OS for a long time now.

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Registered: Oct 2000
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quote:

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Originally posted by homer
I'm very happy for Be. It's a great OS and does not deserve to die. I hope Palm keeps developing the full desktop OS as well...

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