Jan 14, 2020 07:00:00

What is the unfortunate OS 'BeOS' buried in the history that Apple may have adopted?

In the IT industry where technology and trends are changing rapidly, there are many products and projects that disappear without spreading to the world, such as a modular smartphone ``

Project Ara '' planned by Google and a smartphone equipped with OS `` Tizen '' developed by Samsung independently To do. In the 1990s developed by the company 'Be' the former employee was launched of Apple, at that time as to be one of the 'BeOS' even those products with advanced features Erin Pinheiro says Mr.

BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X | Hackaday
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/beos-the-alternate-universes-mac-os-x/

BeOS was developed based on the object orientation of C ++ , and provided advanced functions at that time, such as multimedia support, preemptive multitasking that can execute multiple tasks in parallel using the interrupt function of the CPU, and journaling file system. OS that has. When dual-core processors were still a dream, computers equipped with BeOS, called BeBoxes, had multiple processors. BeBox was launched on the market in October 1995 and used a dual processor with PowerPC architecture, LED and MIDI interface to indicate CPU loading status.

By the time BeBox came along, Apple had shown interest in the acquisition of Be, which had been struggling to develop a next-generation operating system. However, Apple's offer to Be of $ 125 million will be rejected by Be. Then Apple bought

NeXT led by Steve Jobs at Be for $ 425 million (about 47 billion yen), more than twice the price offered to Be, and announces Mac OS X integrating NeXT technology became.

With the elimination of acquisition negotiations, Be's hardware has become commercially challenging and will focus on software development. Porting to x86 , a more common architecture than PowerPC, was done to get more hardware to use BeOS, but sales of Be continued to decline. In 2001, Be fired a majority of its employees and was eventually acquired by Palm .

However, the vision of Be's employees remained

unbroken, and was taken over by an open source project called Haiku . Haiku released its first beta in September 2018, and the nightly build is still being updated. Package managers and new media formats like those found in Linux are supported.

Pinheiro said, `` If Be, instead of NeXT, was acquired by Apple, there is now no way to know what the current desktop computer was, but it is very fun to think about the past '' Is.

Haiku can be downloaded from the following and installed in a virtual environment such as VirtualBox .

Home | Haiku Project
https://www.haiku-os.org/