Haiku: BeOS Reborn

[Michael Haney]

Just learned about this one.  When I worked in support for HP I
remembered reading about BeOS.  In the 90's it was praised for its
multimedia prowess and was a contender as a replacement to Mac OS
Classic along with Next Step (a Steve Jobs project, which was bought
by Apple and some of its features made it into Mac OS X).

The company that developed BeOS, Be Inc., went under a long time ago
but a small community of devoted users and developers are keeping it
alive.  There have been past efforts to recreate BeOS since the OS
never went open source (a company called Zeta owns the rights to the
source now).  Haiku is the latest and apparently shows a lot of
promise even though their code is still in the Alpha stages.

While not Linux or Ubuntu related its nice to see vintage OSes like
this one appearing again and getting attention.  Both Gnome and KDE
have BeOS themes, BTW.  There

http://www.haiku-os.org/

Speaking of vintage OSes, I used to work for a company in Detroit, MI
which sold IBM OS/2 Warp.  It was before Windows 95 made an
appearance.  I used OS/2 Warp quite a bit and it was a very fast and
robust OS which had impressive technology under the hood.  I compared
it later to Windows 95 and there just wasn't any comparison.  OS/2
Warp clearly had Win95 beat, but IBM just couldn't compete with
Micro$oft's marketing department and the borderline illegal
contractual agreements made with PC makers prevented them from
offering anything else other than Win95.

-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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