There must be a name for the logical fallacy I see whenever someone pines over a past "clearly superior" technology that wasn't adopted or had its project cancelled, but I can never grasp it. I guess the closest thing to it is an unfalsifiable statement.
The problem comes from people remembering all of the positive traits (often just promises) of a technology but either forgetting all the problems it had or the technology never being given enough of a chance for people to discover all the areas in which it is a bit crap.
BeOS? Impressive technology demo. Missing loads of features expected in a modern OS, even at that time. No multi-user model even!
This is also a big phenomenon in e.g. aviation. The greatest fighter jet ever is always the one that (tragically!) got cancelled before anyone could discover its weaknesses.
Exactly this. I'm as big a fan of "alternative tech timelines" as the next nerd, but I also can see in retrospect why we have the set of compromises we have today, and all along I watched the intense efforts people made to navigate the mindbogglingly complicated minefield of competing approaches and political players and technical innovations that were on the scene.
People have been working damned hard to build things like Gtk, Qt, etc. not to mention Wayland, etc. all the while maintaining compatibility etc and I personally am happy for their efforts.
BeOS/HaikuOS is a product of a mid-90s engineering scene that predates the proliferation of GPUs, the web, and the set of programming languages that we work with today. There's nothing wrong with it in that context, but it's also not "better." Just different compromises.
The other one I see nostalgia nerds reach for is the Amiga. A system highly coupled to a set of custom chips that only made sense when RAM was as fast (or faster) than the CPU, whose OS had no memory protection, and which was easily outstripped in technical abilities by the early 90s by PCs with commodity ISA cards, etc. because of the development of economics of scale in computer manufacturing, etc. It was ahead of its time for about 2-3 years in the mid 80s, but in a way that was a dead end.
Anyways, what we have right now is a messy set of compromises. It doesn't hurt to go looking for simplifications, but it does hurt to pretend that the compromises don't exist for a reason.
EDIT: I would add though that "multiuser" as part of a desktop (or especially mobile) OS has maybe proven to be a pointless thing. The vast majority of Linux machines out there in the world are run in a single user fashion, even if they are capable of multiuser. Android phones, Chromebooks, desktop machines, and even many servers -- mostly run with just one master user. And we've also seen how rather not-good the Unix account permissions model is in terms of security, and how weak its timesharing of resources etc is in context of today's needs -- hence the development of cgroups, containers, and virtual machine / hypervisor etc.
I mean, in those cases they're almost always just using multiple users as a proxy for job authorization levels, not people.
Anybody who is serious about securing a single physical machine for multiuser access isn't doing it through multiple OS accounts, and is slicing it up by VMs, instead.
I do have a home (Windows) computer that gets used by multiple family members through accounts, but I think this isn't a common real world use case.
> There must be a name for the logical fallacy I see whenever someone pines over a past "clearly superior" technology that wasn't adopted or had its project cancelled, but I can never think of it. I guess the closest thing to it is an unfalsifiable statement.
You can run Haiku today, so it's hardly unfalsifiable, nor an effect of nostalgia or whatever way you want to phrase it.
> BeOS? Impressive technology demo. Missing loads of features expected in a modern OS, even at that time. No multi-user model even!
"Even at that time" is just false. multi-user safe OSes abound in the 90s?
> You can run Haiku today, so it's hardly unfalsifiable
Excellent, so let's falsify it: how come 20 years later the best thing people really have to say about BeOS/Haiku is that is has smooth window dragging?
> multi-user safe OSes abound in the 90s?
Windows NT.
Linux and at least two other free unixes.
Countless proprietary unixes.
VMS.
The widespread desktop OSs in the 90s were not considered serious OSs even then, more accidents of backward-compatibility needs.
The thing about Haiku is that their plan (initially as "OpenBeOS") was since they're just re-doing BeOS and some of BeOS is Open Source they'll just get some basics working then they're right back on the horse and in a few years they'll be far ahead of where BeOS was.
Over two decades later they don't have a 1.0 release.
The problem comes from people remembering all of the positive traits (often just promises) of a technology but either forgetting all the problems it had or the technology never being given enough of a chance for people to discover all the areas in which it is a bit crap.
BeOS? Impressive technology demo. Missing loads of features expected in a modern OS, even at that time. No multi-user model even!
This is also a big phenomenon in e.g. aviation. The greatest fighter jet ever is always the one that (tragically!) got cancelled before anyone could discover its weaknesses.