BeOS

From ArticleWorld

BeOS is an operating system designed by Be, Inc. in the early 1990s. BeOS is a real-time operating system specially intended for multimedia applications, which initially ran on Be's own hardware platform, the PowerPC-based BeBox. Be. Inc's bet was that Apple would buy the company, porting BeOS to PReP and CHRP. Apple decided to buy NeXT though, and did not disclose information about the Apple G3's architecture, forcing Be to port BeOS on x86. Although BeOS was bought by Palm, the BeOS project is continued and even a commercial project, Zeta, is available. A significant user base is available.

Features

BeOS has a modular microkernel with real-time support at its base. This kernel makes BeOS a very responsive, although sometimes unstable operating system. BeOS can handle multiprocessor systems, featuring pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and BFS, a 64-bit journaled file system with indexing support. BeOS includes an excellent C++ API, making programming very easy. The API is POSIX-compatible, running Bash and a number of other Unix programs (even gcc), although the system itself is not based on or derived from Unix.

The distinctive feature of the BeOS desktop is the yellow, rectangular titlebar that only extends so that it can include the whole title, instead of extending to the whole width of the window.

Further development

After the intellectual property of Be was sold to Palm, the source code for BeOS version 5.1 was leaked. Several later projects appeared:

• Haiku, Blue Eyed OS and Cosmoe, which aim to recreate BeOS from scratch, or at least to reproduce its API and general appearance. At the moment, the only project with significant activity is Haiku, which is the leader in its field.

• Zeta. Zeta is YellowTAB's attempt at continuing the BeOS development. The company has never revealed the relationship with Palm or with BeOS's source code. They seem to be allowed to use the source code, but not the BeOS name.