 Screenshot of a BeOS system running several multimedia applications simultaneously; a CPU meter shows load spread across two processors BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Incorporated in 1990.
A highly modular OS written in completely new code (and not based on UNIX, a common misconception due to Be's inclusion of the Bash command shell and some similarities in its directory structure), it is optimised for digital media work - digital audio, digital video, and 3D graphics and animations. Also unlike UNIX, it is a single-user operating system. It is multiprocessor capable and emphasizes high efficiency, modular I/O bandwidth and pervasive multi-threading for preemptive multitasking, graphical flexibility, and real-time responsiveness. It has an optimised 64-bit journaling and indexed file system called BFS, but rather than use a database BeOS relied on its low OS latencies to journal and query file attributes on the fly. A new multithreaded graphical user interface was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design. The interface API was written in C++ for ease-of-programming. It has POSIX compatibility and access to a command line interface through the Bash shell.
Initially the OS ran on its own BeBox hardware; it was extended to cover other computers running PowerPC processors and then ported to the more popular Intel processor based computers. Despite interest from Apple to replace the Mac OS with BeOS, the system did not achieve a significant marketshare. In 2001 Be's intellectual property was sold to Palm, Inc.. BeOS 5 is considered the last version, though a substantial upgrade was in the works before the bankruptcy.
In February 2001 Be Inc. filed suit against Microsoft. For several years Microsoft operated exclusive licensing deals with PC manufacturers that effectively prevented the release of machines with both Microsoft's Windows and another operating system (such as BeOS) pre-installed. Be claimed that this anti-competitive behavior prevented them from gaining a foothold in the marketplace, subsequently forced them out of business. In fact, Be Inc.'s CEO (Jean-Louis Gassée) offered to give BeOS for free to any PC manufacturer who would dual-boot Windows and BeOS; due to Microsoft's threats, few manufacturers took up this deal, with AST Research and Hitachi being the only major names to do so. On September 5 2003 Microsoft and Be Inc. settled their case with Be Inc. receiving $23.2 million and Microsoft no longer being accused of anticompetitive wrongdoing.
Be, Inc. maintains a website for shareholders at [1] (http://www.beincorporated.com). An employee of Be, Inc. has been trying to sell be.com for a large figure for approximately two years and recently it seems to have been purchased by a company in Hong Kong, however beincorporated.com remains as the technical contact.
Projects to recreate BeOS
BeOS was well loved by many people, and the BeOS userbase was disappointed when Be, Inc. failed commercially and no further enhancement of the operating system would be possible. As of 2002, a few projects have formed to independently recreate BeOS in varying ways, with the eventual goal of then continuing where Be left off. To ensure that the Be community does not again "lose" their OS, and to attract the efforts of volunteer programmers, these projects are all open source (in much the same way that Linux, BSD, and GNU set out to create open source equivalents of UNIX). The modular nature of the original BeOS facilitates recreating the operating system a piece at a time, inserting the newly coded modules into a working BeOS system to test compatibility. Eventually all of the "servers" (interworking modules of code) are to be replaced with original, freely licensed code.
Projects to continue BeOS
- YellowTAB is believed to have the rights to use the unfinished BeOS R5.1 sourcebase, but not the BeOS trademark, and currently distributes a pre-release of the OS project called Zeta. YellowTAB has never stated their legal position in regards to the BeOS code-base (perhaps for contractual reasons), and because of this, has created a great amount of controversy and skepticism in the Be community.
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