BeOS

The BeOS was an interesting, powerful, and probably the most jinxed OS that was ever created. It debuted in 1991 and some of its innovations such as a 64-bit journaling file system in BFS, still haven’t found their way into current operating systems.

BeOS came very close to becoming the operating system that we use on the Mac platform today. BeOS started out as an proprietary operating system for the BeBox which was a workstation that ran PowerPC CPUs. When the BeBox failed to go anywhere in the marketplace, Be tried to sell the company to Apple to replace MacOS, which by 1996 was starting to show its age in the face of Windows 95. Apple nearly did it, but decided to buy NeXT and bring back Steve Jobs as mentioned above.

Be then continued its desperate bid to find a home and purpose for the OS. It started by trying to peddle BeOS to the makers of Mac-clones who were cut off from Apple when Steve Jobs returned. That didn’t work. (Yes, in the mid-90’s you could actually buy clones of the Mac. Apple licensed the OS and the Mac ROMs to OEMs. One of Steve’s first actions upon getting back in at Apple was to squash the Mac-clone market.)

Be then tried to port the BeOS to the Intel platform and get some traction against Windows. That didn’t work either. Be next tried to create a version of BeOS for Internet appliances. When that failed as well, Be sold out to PalmSource who wanted to include BeOS technology in their next OS. Guess how that turned out? PalmSource subsequently crashed and burned, selling the rights to BeOS to Access Co, a maker of mobile devices.

I never used BeOS other than to install it and kick it around a little to see how it worked. I have a copy running in Virtual PC on my test machine, but due to limited hardware support of the virtual machine environment, BeOS won’t come up in color and won’t talk to the network card. The screen shot below comes from jfedor.org.