Concept in Definition ABC

Although the so-called "war of operating systems" in desktop systems seems to have always been reduced to the triumvirate formed by Windows, Mac OS X and GNU / Linux, the truth is that some more options have been discarded along the way. This is the case with BeOS.

BeOS was an operating system created by Be Inc for desktop machines, the development of which spanned from 1995 to 2000.

It was the brainchild of Jean-Louis Gassée, an Apple executive who left in 1990, and created Be with the idea of ​​building a new operating system general purpose and a platform for hardware to make it work.

BeOS (Be Operating System) was prepared to work on PowerPC architectures (typical of the Apple Macintosh at that time). era) and Intel x86 (mainstream PCs), taking advantage of the latest technical advances in microprocessors and the architecture of computers, such as symmetric multiprocessing, preemptive multitasking, or multithreading

The user interface of the system was also developed by Be Inc, with elements that differentiated it from the range of operating systems available at the time.

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For example, the window title bar, with the close, maximize, and minimize buttons, does not covered the entire length of it, but only a portion, to the left of the top of the window.

The Tracker, located at the top left of the screen, was another distinctive element of the interface of Username, which served as a task bar.

The problem with BeOS, which was not a bad operating system and still has its legion of fans today, is that it did not win the favor of one sufficient mass of user public to be profitable to Be. However, from a technological point of view, the platform was interesting.

That motivated Be Inc. out of interest for an acquisition. Among the candidates were Apple and Palm, the latter being the one that took it.

Apple was looking at the time for a replacement for the classic Mac OS (which later became found in NeXTSTEP, the system of NeXT computers created by Steve Jobs), and was interested in the BeOS.

After all, not only did it run on the PowerPC hardware platform, but it had been created by former Apple workers.

Finally, it was Palm that acquired the company to use BeOS technologies in its new generation of operating systems.

However, bad luck seemed to be haunting BeOS and, in turn, Palm ended up being chopped up and its assets distributed among several companies, such as the Japanese Access, or the North American HP.

The inheritance of BeOS has not been lost, but has survived in other projects that extend to the present day.

The first was Zeta, a system from YellowTab (a German company later renamed Magnussoft) that continued to evolve from the BeOS source code.

In 2007, this clone was discontinued due to poor sales, which made it economically unviable.

Haiku is another initiative to keep BeOS alive, albeit with a difference from Zeta: it is not based on the original BeOS source code.

Despite this, it is compatible at the code source and binaries with the original BeOS, so it is feasible to use the Catalogue of BeOS programs on this platform.

Along the way, there have been projects that revived the interface graph of the system user in the GNU / Linux environment, and penguin system distributions that emulated the system created by Be Inc.

Photo: Fotolia - georgejmclittle

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