BeOS R5 5.0.1 An Alternative PC Operating System – A Multitasking Example (PC)(x86)(PCEm v17)

#PCEm #BeOS #Multitasking

BeOS is an operating system for PCs developed by Be Inc in 1990, at first it was designed to only run on BeBOX hardware which resembled PPC Macintosh machines of that time.

It was promoted as an OS tailored to multimedia – more so than Windows 9x/NT and MacOS were at the time. It never achieved a proper market share and Be Inc didn’t turn out to be commercially viable. Be Inc was acquired by Palm Inc.

At some point in time Jean-Louis Gassée – the CEO of Be Inc – was negotiating with Apple to see if BeOS could be a replacement for the Classic MacOS but negotiations were ended because Jean-Louis asked 300 million US dollars but Apple was only willing to offer 125 million US dollars.

NextStep was later thought to be a better option and it was acquired by Apple in 1996 for 429 million US dollars, much more than BeOS would have cost but Next/NextStep is the basis/origins of modern day OS X which has been named back to MacOS – it also brought Steve Jobs back into the Apple-fold.

BeOS was actively being worked on by Be Inc right up to its demise. The Bone (BeOS Networking Environment) stack was added to BeOS 5.x.x but despite it never being officially released to the public it did get into the hands of many of the BeOS users of that time.

So BeOS ended up being not much of a player in the market at all and would have died a silent death. Where it not that today the OS itself but also offshoots commercial and open source are still being used by enthusiasts today.
BlueEyedOS: is a variant running on top of a Linux kernel with a BeOS API re-implementation but this renders APPS not binary compatible (Development stopped in 2003)
Comsmoe: Haiku Userland on top of a Linux kernel that also needed APPS to be recompiled for the OS, no binary compatibility (last release 2004)
E OS: Emulator Operating System (I quite like that) based on Linux and Free BSD intended to run Windows, DOS, AmigaOS and BeOS applications. Open source but hasn’t been developed since 2008.
Haiku: Which actually is a complete re-implementation and is NOT based on Linux or BSD is binary compatible with BeOS R4/R5 software. Still being developed with the latest Beta release stemming from June 9 2020.

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