BeOS The sleek alternative.
Be Inc. (founded by exApple executive Frenchman Jean-Louis Gassée) launched the BeBox in October 1995, running its own operating system, BeOS. Optimised around multimedia performance for the masses, BeOS was intended to compete with both Mac OS and Windows. Lightning fast and free of the legacies of old 16-bit hardware, BeOS had features such as symmetric multiprocessing for multiCPU machines, pre-emptive multitasking, and the 64-bit journaled file system BFS. Although the BeBox itself was unsuccessful, BeOS was ported to the Macintosh in 1996, and almost became the new system to replace Mac OS. Gassée’s US$300 million asking price was too steep, however, and Apple went with Steve Jobs’s NeXTSTEP OS instead. BeOS was then ported to the PC in 1998, along with a free stripped-down BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition, but it failed to gain more than a niche audience (Microsoft may also have worked against its adoption). Be Inc. was bought out by Palm Inc. in 2001. Despite numerous recreations, BeOS is now survived by Haiku, a popular open-source reimplementation with BeOS binary compatibility on 32-bit versions.