BeOS PE and BeIA proved to be too little too late, and in 2001 Be's intellectual property was sold to Palm, Inc. also released a stripped-down version of BeOS for Internet Appliances (BeIA), which soon became the company's business focus in place of BeOS.
BeOS PE could be started from within Microsoft Windows or Linux, and was intended to nurture consumer interest in its product and give developers something to tinker with.īe Inc. released a stripped-down, but free, copy of BeOS R5 known as BeOS Personal Edition (BeOS PE). As a last-ditch effort to increase interest in the failing operating system, Be Inc. Through the late 1990s, BeOS managed to create a niche of followers, but the company failed to remain viable.
These systems could dual boot either the Mac OS or BeOS, with a start-up screen offering the choice.ĭue to Apple's moves and the mounting debt of Be Inc., BeOS was soon ported to the Intel x86 platform with its R3 release in March 1998. In 1997, Power Computing began bundling BeOS (on a CD for optional installation) with its line of PowerPC-based Macintosh clones. To further complicate matters for Be, Apple refused to disclose certain architectural information about its G3 line of computers-information Be deemed critical to making BeOS work on the latest Apple hardware. Apple's board of directors decided NeXTSTEP was a better choice and purchased NeXT in 1996 for $429 million, bringing back Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Apple CEO Gil Amelio started negotiations to buy Be Inc., but negotiations stalled when Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassée wanted $200 million Apple was unwilling to offer any more than $125 million.
Initially designed to run on AT&T Hobbit-based hardware, BeOS was later modified to run on PowerPC-based processors: first Be's own systems, later Apple, Inc.'s PowerPC Reference Platform and Common Hardware Reference Platform, with the hope that Apple would purchase or license BeOS as a replacement for its then aging Mac OS Classic. Alpha 1 of Haiku was released in September 2009. The open-source OS Haiku is designed to start up where BeOS left off. and today BeOS is mainly used and developed by a small population of enthusiasts.
However, it was ultimately unable to achieve a significant market share and proved commercially unviable for Be Inc. It has POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system.īeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform which could be used by a substantial population of desktop users and a competitor to Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. The API was written in C++ for ease of programming. The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design.
BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a custom 64-bitjournaling file system known as BFS. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware.
Opens zipped files so that they can be viewed, deleted or stored.īeOS was an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. This is a mirror of BeOS R5 Personal Edition for Linux.