A nostalgic dive into the Hacker News thread that in 2015 reminded us how beautiful we were when we dreamed in multithreading
Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away called “the ’90s,” we still believed that the future of computing would be decided based on pure technical merit. What naivety! It was an era when an operating system could make you fall in love at first boot, when opening four videos simultaneously without hiccups seemed more magical than pulling a rabbit from a hat. BeOS wasn’t just an operating system: it was a promise, a dream, a love letter to the beauty of well-crafted code.
The nostalgia thread: when Hacker News started crying
In 2015, while everyone was discussing the Apple Watch and the Ellen Pao controversy on Reddit, someone on Hacker News had the brilliant (or cruel) idea of posting a BeOS demo video from 1998. And so, like war veterans reuniting over an old photograph, the community gathered for a moment of collective nostalgia that hurt more than a romantic breakup.
“BeOS was really amazing at the time,” began one user with the same emotion as someone talking about their first love. And they were right, dammit! While Windows NT pretended to be a serious operating system, while Linux was still “unusable for mortals” (oh, those times!), and while Copland remained the vaporware it was, BeOS ran smooth as silk on machines you’d use as paperweights today.
The architecture that made us dream (and still makes us cry)
Looking back today, BeOS had everything we’re still trying to get from our modern operating systems. Pervasive multithreading? Check. File system with metadata and database-like queries? Check. Low-latency audio and video that never skipped a beat? Double check with standing ovation.
As a former Be employee recounted in the thread (one of those lucky ones who lived the dream from the inside): “You could deadlock the entire system, but I’ll be damned if your CD was going to stop playing perfectly. Not even a skip.” This, ladies and gentlemen, is poetry applied to computer science.
And then there was BeFS, that file system Bill Gates dreamed about at night for his never-born WinFS. Metadata, indexing, queries… everything we take for granted today, BeOS was doing in the ’90s with the elegance of a dancer and the power of a freight train.
The great “what if” of computing history
The Hacker News thread quickly became a group therapy session for nerds. “What if Apple had bought Be instead of NeXT?” It’s the kind of question that keeps you awake at night, like “What if dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct?” or “What if I had bought Bitcoin in 2009?”
Imagine: instead of OS X based on NeXTSTEP, we would have had an Apple system based on BeOS. No decades-old Unix cruft, no Mach kernel heavy as an elephant, but an operating system born for multimedia, elegant as a Lamborghini and fast as… well, as a Lamborghini.
One user fantasized: “I think Macs would have become the de facto standard for web developers.” Others dreamed of a world where Adobe would have bought Be, becoming the creative platform par excellence. Beautiful dreams that only hurt to think about.
The bitter lesson of the market
But then, as in all stories that end badly, market reality arrives to ruin the party. Microsoft and its OEM practices that prevented BeOS from being pre-installed, the lack of applications (“It just needed apps” – the saddest refrain in computing history), the wrong timing.
“The best product doesn’t always win,” someone philosophized in the thread. And they were tragically right. While BeOS demonstrated that it was possible to do better, much better, the world continued using Windows because “it’s already installed” and “everyone uses it.” The brute force of network effects against the elegance of technical innovation: 1-0, ball to center.
The survivors: when past meets present
The beauty of the thread was that it wasn’t just sterile nostalgia. There were Be Inc veterans telling stories from the inside (“Many of the people from Be ended up at Android“), there were Haiku OS developers keeping the flame alive, there were youngsters discovering this lost world for the first time.
Haiku OS, the open source project trying to recreate BeOS, was (and still is) proof that some dreams are too beautiful to die. It will never be the same as the original, but at least it tries. It’s like listening to a Beatles cover band: not the same thing, but it warms your heart.
The irony of the present
The funniest part (in a tragicomic sense) is that in 2015, while everyone was getting emotional about BeOS, we were using operating systems that still hadn’t solved problems that Be had tackled in the ’90s. Linux desktop still messed up between different DEs? Check. Windows still with that thirty-year-old architecture dressed up as modern? Check. macOS accumulating cruft since Bush Sr. was president? Check.
One user in the thread put it perfectly: “I feel like even today, we are not seeing the true possible performance of our hardware due to all the ‘sediment layers’.” This is BeOS’s true legacy: the awareness that we could do much, much better.
The moral of the story (if we really must have one)
The Hacker News thread about BeOS in 2015 was more than a moment of nostalgia: it was a painful reminder of how the computing world is full of crossroads where we took the wrong path. Not because NeXT was bad (actually, it gave birth to macOS which all things considered isn’t doing too badly), but because BeOS represented an alternative so clean, so elegant, so… right.
Maybe this is what we miss most: not BeOS itself, but that era when we still believed that the best technology would win. When we thought it was enough to make something beautiful to conquer the world. What sweet naivety!
Today we know that ecosystems win, network effects, aggressive business practices, timing, luck. But sometimes, in threads like the one from 2015, we allow ourselves the luxury of still dreaming. Of imagining a world where technical beauty matters more than balance sheets, where architectural elegance beats vendor lock-in.
BeOS didn’t die in 2001 when Be Inc closed shop. BeOS dies a little every day, every time we accept mediocrity because “it works anyway,” every time we don’t demand better from our systems. But it’s also reborn, every time someone like those in the Hacker News thread remembers that we can do better.
And in the end, maybe this is the real lesson: never stop dreaming of perfect operating systems, even if we’ll probably never see them. Because the day we stop dreaming, we’ll have definitively lost.
About The Author
Andrea Always been a computer nerd.
BeOS was love at first sight.
HaikuOS is its heir. See author's posts