Reply to post: Re: Overlay

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Overlay

[Author here]

> log in to a different environment for the same user

Well, as there is no log in mechanism currently, that could be tricky!

It's like the good old days of OS/2 2, or RISC OS, or AmigaOS, or ST TOS, or various other late-1980s and early-1990s OSes I used. You turn it on, it boots, you're in.

No name, no password, no serial number, no badge, nothing.

Fun story:

I was at the launch of MS Office 97, waaaaaaay back. It was launched at an amazing private "magic house" in Kennington in South London, near where I lived.

MS demoed it on Windows 95. Some machines got rebooted. This caused great consternation, because it displayed a login screen and nobody knew the credentials.

I only heard about this later -- to be honest, I was probably in the bar. Apparently a lot of UK IT luminaries were baffled. Many of the hardcore types had already switched to NT 4 by then, a proper OS with login security. They'd forgotten, if they ever knew, that Win95 didn't have any. If you didn't know the password, or username, or both, you just...

Pressed Escape.

And off it went, full 100% access to everything. It only passed any credentials you gave it to network servers. Windows 9x itself literally had no use for them. It ran on FAT and had no way to check, apply, or store user permissions, because FAT doesn't do that. You are always the admin because there is nobody else.

Well, Haiku is the same.

At least for now. They could have got some of this under the hood, but I have not heard of it.

I did not go into great technical depth on any of the clever stuff in Haiku, partly for lack of room. There's plenty. I hope that I will come back to this when I write about Haiku 1.0.

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