BeOS was such a curious thing — a ground-up, brand new operating system optimized for “multimedia” and the internet, launched in the mid 90’s by some former Apple folks. I bought a boxed copy at the university book store when I was an undergraduate and booted into it alongside Windows (NT!!) and Red Hat Linux (the late 90s were wild kids). I genuinely loved BeOS — it was fast and unique and had a decent browser but no other real software to speak of, which was a real challenge in the time before everything could be accomplished with a browser.

Without an ecosystem of third-party software it couldn’t find an edge between Windows and the then-actually-beleaguered Mac. BeOS promised a “clean slate” that was developer friendly but it was just foreign enough, not to mention a platform with no real user base, that it wouldn’t gain enough traction to sustain. And even though it had a POSIX compatible shell, it wasn’t actually Unix underneath, so it didn’t fit with the emerging Linux ecosystem either (Unix applications were able to be ported over, but it wasn’t just a simple recompile). After Apple purchased Next instead of Be to replace the Classic OS, the IP bounced around and some of the tech ended up in a few internet and media appliances that are still in use today. The open source Haiku project has re-implemented and expanded on the core BeOS functionality.