BeOS [part 1]

BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was built 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 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design. BeOS used Unicode as the default encoding in the GUI, though support for input methods such as bidirectional text input was never realized.

BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users and a competitor to Classic Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. It was ultimately unable to achieve a significant market share, however, and proved commercially unviable for Be Inc. The company was acquired by Palm Inc. and today BeOS is mainly used and developed by a small population of enthusiasts.

HISTORY

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 aging Classic Mac OS. Apple CEO Gil Amelio started negotiations to buy Be Inc., but negotiations stalled when Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassée wanted $300 million; Apple was unwilling to offer any more than $125 million. 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.

BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition

This version of BeOS is the Personal Edition, which can be downloaded freely from the Internet and installed under Windows. Under Windows 95 and Windows 98 you can just double click an icon to exit Windows and start this version of BeOS. On ME or NT 4 or later you can use a boot floppy to start the installed BeOS.

Unfortunately Be ran in to problems competing with Microsoft, such as Microsoft's license agreements with OEMs that forbid them from selling computers that booted more than one OS. In 2001 after changing their focus to "internet appliances", Be Inc. went out of business.

This is the default desktop that you first see when booting up BeOS Personal Edition. Icons and folders can be placed directly on the desktop. The bar in the upper right is the "Deskbar".

One of the most noted features of BeOS is its use of tabs instead of typical title bars. This perhaps saves a little bit of screen space and definitely gives the windowing system a unique appearance.

Clicking on the BeOS logo on the Deskbar brings up a menu with programs you can run. The Deskbar can also be dragged to other corners of the screen or to the upper or lower of the screen to give it a "Windows task bar" appearance.

Running programs appear on the Deskbar. If a program has multiple windows only one icon is shown but clicking on the program icon displays a list of open windows you can select from.

The Tracker is the file manager used by BeOS and is equivalent to the Windows 95 Explorer or the MacOS finder. It can view files as normal icons, a list of small icons or in a detailed view. (No pointless "web" view thanks goodness)

Although much of BeOS has a MacOS feel to it the windowing system places menus in each window rather than at the top.

BeOS offers virtual desktops called "workspaces". Each workspace may have its own background and screen resolution. It is possible to configure the number of available workspaces.

BeOS includes a basic web browser application called NetPositive.

Some of the default icons on the desktop were links to the Be web site, however as you can see the Be web site is long gone.

The BeOS media player can play a number of different file formats. One of the strengths of BeOS is that it is designed and optimized to handle multiple media streams.

BeOS includes some nice, although simple, screen savers.

A number of aspects of the BeOS GUI are customizable including menu behaviors, and the scroll bar appearance.

There is also a hidden trick that let's you change the title bar appearance. If you hold down ctrl-alt-shift and open the Be Menu you will see an extra "Window Decor" option that let's you select between BeOS, AmigaOS, MacOS 8, and Windows 9x appearances. Note though that even with these appearances the titlebars still exhibit BeOS like behavior. (such as double clicking the title bar minimizes instead of maximizes.)

This is the Software Valet application which is used to install packaged software. Software that installs itself in this manner can be uninstalled or updated.

Other software can also be installed simply by unzipping it using a utility called the Expand-O-Matic.

CONTINUATION AND CLONES

In the years that followed the demise of Be Inc. a handful of projects formed to recreate BeOS or key elements of the OS with the eventual goal of then continuing where Be Inc. left off. This was facilitated by the fact that Be Inc. released some components of BeOS under a free licence. Here is a list of these projects:

• BlueEyedOS: It uses a modified version of the Linux kernel that allows it to run Beos applications. It is free and open source software. There have been no releases since 2003.
• Cosmoe: A user interface for Linux that can run most BeOS applications. It is free and open source software. The last release was in 2004 and its website is no longer online.
• E/OS: short for Emulator Operating System. A Linux and FreeBSD-based operating system that aimed to run Windows, DOS, AmigaOS and BeOS applications. It is free and open source software. Active development ended in July 2008.
• Haiku: A complete reimplementation of BeOS not based on Linux. It is free and open source software. The first alpha release, "Haiku R1 / Alpha 1", was released on September 14, 2009. The second alpha release, "Haiku R1 / Alpha 2", was made available on May 9, 2010, and the third alpha release, "Haiku R1 / Alpha 3", on June 18, 2011. "Haiku R1 / Alpha 4" was released November 12, 2012. As of 2018, it is the only BeOS clone still under development, with the first Beta version released on September 28, 2018.
• Zeta was a commercially available operating system based on the BeOS R5.1 codebase. Originally developed by yellowTAB, the operating system was then distributed by magnussoft. During development by yellowTAB, the company received criticism from the BeOS community for refusing to discuss its legal position with regard to the BeOS codebase (perhaps for contractual reasons). Access Co. (which bought PalmSource, until then the holder of the intellectual property associated with BeOS) has since declared that yellowTAB had no right to distribute a modified version of BeOS, and magnussoft has ceased distribution of the operating system.

PRODUCT USING BeOS

BeOS (and now Zeta) continue to be used in media appliances, such as the Edirol DV-7 video editors from Roland Corporation, which run on top of a modified BeOS and the Tunetracker radio automation software that used to run it on BeOS and Zeta, and it was also sold as a "Station-in-a-Box" with the Zeta operating system included. Nowadays, Tunetracker has switched to Haiku.

The Tascam SX-1 digital audio recorder runs a heavily modified version of BeOS that will only launch the recording interface software.

iZ Technology Corporation sells the RADAR 24, RADAR V and RADAR Studio, hard disk-based, 24-track professional audio recorders based on BeOS 5, although the newer RADAR 6 is not based on BeOS.

Magicbox, a manufacturer of signage and broadcast display machines, uses BeOS to power their Aavelin product line.

Final Scratch, a 12″ vinyl timecode record-driven DJ software/hardware system, was first developed on BeOS. The "ProFS" version was sold to a few dozen DJs prior to the 1.0 release, which ran on a Linux virtual partition.

Official BeOS Demo Video from Be, Inc.

In the part 2, we will see the most recent reimplementation of BeOS, Haiku OS