Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 14th Sep 2009 06:04 UTC
Thread beginning with comment 384371
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Be had to have Pentium (90?) or above but your about it's video prowess is right. Ever play movies on all 6 faces of a rotating cube?
As to GoBe's software, or at least Productive, I believe it is in an Indian company's hands at present.They once made a statement about intentions to keep developing it, but I've heard no further word on that. I always hoped the Linux version would be finished and that all three versions would be brought up to date. I still use it for some personal matters because I just got so damn used to it that I hate to switch to something less easy to use.




Member since:
2005-07-06
There were very good reasons that Apple bought NeXT instead of Be. NeXT was a lot more mature than BeOS was. Plus there was Steve Jobs. No matter what you want to say, the maturity of NeXT and Steve Jobs were the difference makers.
This does not mean that BeOS didn't have a lot going for it. Maturity wasn't one of them though. I LOVED how I could run 16 different videos at the same time on the screen on a 486 and all of them would run without losing any frames. And you could click from one to the other and the sound would instantly switch from one video to another. That was fantastic!
I really hoped that BeOS would have time to mature so I could full realize what it could do along with, at the time, OS/2 (now eComStation), which was my favorite OS then. This is after Be Inc stopped making their own boxes and before the death spiral came into full effect when they got locked out of new Macs (new G3s and G4s).
At the time IBM kept saying, "OS/2 is dead" so I was trying to find another OS to switch to (all of you could easily understand why Windows wasn't considered as an option, not any version even yet). I bought licenses for BeProductive (office suite) and other Be programs. You can also understand how further pissed off I was at Microsoft for using their monopoly power to stop OEMs from being able to install BeOS on big name computers.
I was disappointed that the original develops of OpenBeOS/Haiku weren't mentioned in the article. Not to take anything away from the current leaders and developers of Haiku, Michael Phipps put his heart and soul into OpenBeOS/Haiku and it wouldn't exist without him. I don't know him personally, never met him, never communicated with him. Credit should be given to him though.