The life of BeOS

If you're running an x86 'desktop' machine today, your choice of OS is limited in the extreme. It's either Windows or Linux. No amount of shuffling desktop themes or skins around will change that fact. However, it wasn't always this way. James "Amiga4Eva" Matson gets all teary eyed and reminisces about the life and times of BeOS.

The journey of an OS from birth to death and back again
By James "Amiga4Eva" Matson

If you're running an x86 'desktop' machine today, your choice of OS is limited in the extreme. It's either Windows or Linux. No amount of shuffling desktop themes or skins around will change that fact.

Somewhere in the distance a software architect laments for diversity.


Wind the clock back a few years and it was a different ballgame. The 80s/90s trend of developing hardware and software platforms as a package was peaking, and everyone from Apple to Commodore was attempting to dominate the market with a unique hardware solution and a proprietary OS to go with it.


It was at the beginning of the 90s that the BeOS (Be Operating System) was conceived. Then Apple executive Jean Louis Gassée,  after an apparent falling out with Apple CEO John Scully, left his position (where he'd overseen projects such as the first colour Mac and failed Mac portable) to start his own platform revolution, a combination of OS and hardware that would inspire a new wave of zealous fans. 


The fact that large numbers of us aren't sitting in front of a BeOS desktop right now is a sign that it failed to make a big splash in the mainstream pond. Thanks to apathetic driver and application support and financial hardship, the BeOS software, the company behind it and the custom hardware it was intended to run on - the BeBox - never really got off the starting line. 


Like so many tech concepts, a lack of market success is not always indicative of a lack of innovation or ingenuity, two qualities BeOS and the BeBox had in spades.

Eager to serve up a complete hardware/software solution that could compete with the likes of the Commodore Amiga, Atari & Apple Mac, Jean Louis and his cohorts formed Be and began work on the hardware that would eventually host BeOS. 


In a technology market that had fallen in lust with the relatively new idiom of multimedia, it was the logical course to build a machine from the ground up that was every bit a sound and video powerhouse.


Enter the BeBox.