Windows 10 switch

[benhutcherson]

I wish I could say I'd used BeOS.

A few years ago, someone gave me a PowerMacintosh 9600/200MP, a computer I'd wanted for my collection, and it came with BeOS installed. I booted it once into BeOS, then ditched that and installed Macintosh OS 9. In retrospect, that was a foolish move-I should have swapped the HDD(since I dabble in Macs of this vintage, I had/have a drawer full of SCSI HDDs at home) and kept the BeOS one. I'd have set it up to dual boot, but I don't know how this age Mac would handle that with a non-Apple OS.

In any case, BeOS has another interesting feature for that particular computer. The "MP" in the model means "multi-processor." It's kind of a weird implementation called "AMP" or "asymetric multi-processing"(modern systems with multiple cores and/or multiple processors, including Apples made after ~1999, are SMP, or symmetric multi-processing). The Macintosh OS(classic, pre-OS X) is aware of the second CPU, but doesn't actually use it even though certain applications(Photoshop is the biggie) can. Even OS X run on a 9600 won't use the second CPU, but BeOS can.

Unfortunately, I don't know if any mainstream coupled chromatography-MS systems made in the last ~30 years use anything other than some form of Windows on an Intel CPU. We do have a home-built NMR in our department running Mac OS 9.2.2 on a PowerMac G4. I also have a Sun UltraSPARC running Solaris UNIX in my office that use to run the 500mhz NMR, although that's since switched to an Intel box running Linux. Years ago, I attempted-unsucessfully-to revive a PE-Sciex ICP-MS that ran on Solaris also, but I never actually got to that point.

[James_Ball]

I wish I could say I'd used BeOS.

A few years ago, someone gave me a PowerMacintosh 9600/200MP, a computer I'd wanted for my collection, and it came with BeOS installed. I booted it once into BeOS, then ditched that and installed Macintosh OS 9. In retrospect, that was a foolish move-I should have swapped the HDD(since I dabble in Macs of this vintage, I had/have a drawer full of SCSI HDDs at home) and kept the BeOS one. I'd have set it up to dual boot, but I don't know how this age Mac would handle that with a non-Apple OS.

In any case, BeOS has another interesting feature for that particular computer. The "MP" in the model means "multi-processor." It's kind of a weird implementation called "AMP" or "asymetric multi-processing"(modern systems with multiple cores and/or multiple processors, including Apples made after ~1999, are SMP, or symmetric multi-processing). The Macintosh OS(classic, pre-OS X) is aware of the second CPU, but doesn't actually use it even though certain applications(Photoshop is the biggie) can. Even OS X run on a 9600 won't use the second CPU, but BeOS can.

Unfortunately, I don't know if any mainstream coupled chromatography-MS systems made in the last ~30 years use anything other than some form of Windows on an Intel CPU. We do have a home-built NMR in our department running Mac OS 9.2.2 on a PowerMac G4. I also have a Sun UltraSPARC running Solaris UNIX in my office that use to run the 500mhz NMR, although that's since switched to an Intel box running Linux. Years ago, I attempted-unsucessfully-to revive a PE-Sciex ICP-MS that ran on Solaris also, but I never actually got to that point.

You can probably still pick up a BeOS iso image from the internet, just have to look around.

I was running it on a quad boot setup, Win95, WinNT4, Mandrake Linux and BeOS. It was on a PentiumII 300mhz HP box.

The absolute weirdest OS I ever worked with was on a Nicolet FTIR that was 20bit, completely incompatible with anything else.