The Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) presents:
Monday, 10/26/98, 3:00 pm
CNMAT, 1750 Arch Street, Berkeley
Timothy Self, Developer Evangelist
Brian Mikol
Doug Wright
Developers of the BeOS real-time operating system will present a demonstration of the latest BeOS and will answer questions about how the system is designed and how to develop for it.
Be was founded in 1990 to build a new operating system optimized for the rich medi a content of modern computing. The BeOS a new operating system designed around the convergence of multimedia, high-performance CPUs, consumer electronics and the Internet is multi-platform, but focused on the Intel Architecture. Be's goal is to provide an exciting new platform for digital content creation, by producing an operating system designed from the ground up to handle the real-time manipulation of high-bandwidth digital media on low-cost personal computers.
The BeOS features:
A True Multitasking, Heavily Multi-threaded System. The BeOS is a heavily threaded system, and the application model is designed to divide an application into multiple threads even if the programmer doesn't explicitly do so. This increases the efficiency and performance of applications and of low-level OS operations, allowing developers to structure their applications for simplicity and performance without worrying about arbitrary architectural limits.
Symmetric Multiprocessing. The most efficient way to take advantage of multiple processors is to allow threads to move from one processor to another depending on system load -- a process called symmetric multiprocessing. The result is significantly greater parallelism on multiprocessor systems, and significantly higher overall performance throughout.
An Object-Oriented Design. The BeOS application programming interface (API) is object-oriented, rather than the procedural API common in other mainstream OS architectures. The result is faster time to market for new applications, and faster revisions to existing applications over time.
A Design for Real-Time Media and Communications. The structure of the BeOS is optimized for dealing with real-time, high-bandwidth data types such as audio and video, and for handling a wide array of communications capabilities.
Simplicity. Throughout the BeOS, there has been a heavy emphasis on delivering simple, elegant solutions to programming problems. The attention to simplicity within the BeOS stems from an underlying belief that software programmers are most effective and efficient when each one can understand the entire OS model.
CNMAT's emphasis on reactive real-time systems for interactive live musical performance and interest in low-latency digital audio processing will certainly shape the presentation.