Spectre/Meltdown happened because Intel ended up on one end of a tradeoff. They favored performance over security.
Windows is like it is because Microsoft only hired fresh-outs and worked 'em like rented mules.
All things considered - *it's not that bad*. It's slow coding to the Win32 interface, but it's not horrible.
But you couldn't buy a BeOS box at Best Buy ( or Bob's Computer Store before that ).
Unfortunately for most of its history x86 wasn't particularly amenable to fast virtualization, a sleek new OS sold in stores in the late 1990s which could also run the majority of legacy DOS and Windows software with little performance hit could have been a contender.
Once OS/2, etc. were gone and Microsoft had the market locked down by the early 2000s Intel and AMD got crackin' on the hardware virtualization support like gangbusters, interesting that.
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Nowadays, one could be ripping a bluray disc into a 35GB mkv file while at the same time watching a 4GB bluray rip of a movie and decoding the audio into 7.1 channels, while your active or live desktop wallpaper does weird s*it in the background... without a hiccup. Next disc... next file... resume movie. Where's my beer...
I had a BeOS box that I used to get into the 99th percentile at seti at home back in the days before GPUs did it. I had five PCs in my living room at one time and many of them multi-booted about three to five different OSes. My dual CPU AMD ran it best from within a Linux session though. Those were the days... '99... 2000... etc.
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I even had a DesqViewX machine. Shame it is tied to quarterdecks memory manager or we could still run it. It did real distributed processing pretty well for what it was. Only if you had TCP/IP protocol on your net. Or like ours... we had super expensive Thomas Conrad NICs across 40 Nodes and back then that was not cheap.
I had an OS/2 machine as well, and was even getting ready to become an OS/2 CNE until MicroSoft took a big dump on IBM.
In college in the mid-late 1990s as students we had more-or-less two choices as to what to use, Windows or Mac. It was an art school and people were trying to do video editing and short film production on Quadra 900s and Performa pizza-boxes.
Sometimes it worked out OK but that period was kind of painful from a multimedia/graphics perspective; software was really trying to do too much with too little compute horsepower to throw at it, and crashes and data loss were commonplace. Later on they started getting PowerPC based G3 and G4 Macs which helped a lot.
Sometime around 1998/99 this one guy sprung for a VooDoo2 graphics accelerator card for his Windows box and everyone s*it them selves oohing and ahhing at the whiz bang effects
File servers, network gateways, and machines for "real s*it" were mostly Solaris/SunOS based with maybe a few Debian Linux machines scattered around later on. Windows 95/98 machines were for word processing.
As late as 1997 it was still common for incoming students to bring Mac SEs, Mac IIs, and 386-based Windows 3.1 desktops with them from home for personal use
BeOS was reincarnated as Haiku-OS:
Looks like it's still reasonably active...
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Yeah, and except for lack of good hardware hooks (read drivers) or accelerated graphics on modern cards...
Well... Just a boot screen to look at, I guess.
Today we have "agile" instead. Which means we don't know where our software is heading but we do sprints to get there.
I wish it had. The RADAR DAW box still runs BeOS. Totally weapons-grade stuff. SFAIK, it's deterministic to a small epsilon.
I suspect interest in a separate server product offering drove the interest in virtualization.
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