Submitted by Did you ever wonder what BeIA really was? A lot of people talked about BeIA back in the days Be, Inc. was still developing its OS for internet appliances, but after Be, Inc. closed its doors, BeIA vanished as well. A thread over on the Haiku discussion forums – which began as a talking point for how Haiku could recreate a BeIA style concept – turned in to a treasure trove of BeIA information, including examples of BeIA running and an overview of some of the process of building BeIA distributions.
This video shows it all in action, including BeIA running under emulation. There’s also a wonderful video shot in Be, Inc’s offices where a Hungarian UG member gets a tour and shown BeIA hardware, with terrible framerate and resolution, but well worth checking out.
Wow! What an OS, really, ahead of it’s time. QNX and BeOS were the best. I regret I did not give the deserved attention to BeOS at the time. And a fun part of the second video (3:13): [Screen shows Google page] “Oh, this is my favorite… search engine!” 🙂
Yep, BeIA was yet another idea that was another Be Inc idea that was just too far ahead of its time. They aimed to create Chromebooks before the web was really ready for full productivity applications. And Be Inc didn’t have the capital needed to wait for 5+ years for the world to catch up, or the clout required to improve web technologies to the point where in-browser applications could seriously replace Windows or Mac fat binaries.
It wasn’t just Be, there were tons of internet appliances. The 3Com Audrey predates BeIA. There was the i-opener, the virgin webplayer, the Gateway Touch Pad, and others I am not remembering off the top of my head. I used to work next to the Intel PADD group which was a wireless web based internet appliance/PDA like device. Intel also had a tablet group that was killed the day before their go live. I worked on a product that was like Sonos (only with a music store and other very cool things) that was killed just before our beta.
The idea wasn’t ahead of it’s time, it was the hardware, the internet, and wireless networking that weren’t ready yet
If I have learned anything it is that every idea is tried before it’s time, multiple times, before it is finally ready.
jockm,
I remember some of those 🙂
Yea, there’s a lot of factors. Most of the progress in mobile consumer tech in the 2000s came about no so much because of new ideas, but because mobile data was finally becoming more accessible. nicholasj is also right that sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a good idea if you don’t have the sums of money needed to bring a product to market. Big companies like microsoft, apple, google, etc are more likely to succeed not because they have better visions, but simply due to asymmetry of resources.
BeIA almost shipped on the Compaq IA and Audrey.
The problem was that all of these were generally based around the National Semiconductor Geode platform, which was basically a low powered x86 processor. So none of them had great battery life really.
The Geode was basically just a Cyrix core, as NS juts continued the Cyrix x86 cores after they merged.
This is what I meant that the hardware wasn’t ready yet. But neither were network speeds, always available internet, or wireless networking. The idea was solid, but the implementation was anticipating a world that wasn’t quite there yet.
The most successful IA out there was WebTV which was built around dialup and the world as it was, not as we wanted it to be. Considering that it lasted from 1995 to 2013 I think they had the right approach for the time.
There will never be a modern resurrection of BeIA untill someone writes some accelerated drivers and ports them to BeOS and the people against them (wanting direct rendering insanity) are finally put to rest as they were in the rest of the industry 20 years ago.
Running old BeIA software on Haiku might be possible though not very useful. At the time BeIA was just too far ahead of it’s time, its like… Roku or Android but 10-15 years too early.
For a better view of the BeOS offices, there was a video of the Be song, yes, BeOS had a SONG —&— a video which showed the offices and some of how BeOS worked. I have it somewhere. It’s just a matter of finding the video. It’s on one of my working iMacs or my Mac Mini or somewhere. If you could post that on OSNews I think all the BeOS fans would love it!
I liked BeOS but not the direction of internet appliance. As an operating system it was nice, quick, better than linux and reasonably easy to develop for, the documentation was free. Problems were Microsoft didn’t like the competition, the USB stack needed work and lack of interest from some software / hardware companies. Drivers were an issue.
gfx1,
Great points. It makes me curious, if microsoft didn’t have it’s monopoly in the 80s/90s, who would have won on merit of the computing platform alone? Oh well, can’t change history.