Tuna Can Org - totally irrelevant stuff

BeOS

The operating system that should have been....

Probably about 1998 or so I was becoming bored with MS Windows, as it was everywhere. Everyone was using a version of Windows, but thanks to the world wide web, I knew there were other computer operating systems out. I made it my mission to do some exploring, to try the other options out there, all in an effort to see if something piqued my curiousity. Linux was interesting, but it's graphical interface wasn't very polished at the time. Little did I know I would find something that would.

While visiting a technology/computer news site (Slashdot), I kept reading entries there from people who loved this operating system called BeOS. These people seemed to really like it, and the screenshots seemed really cool. After some investigation, I found that the BeOS was just released for the Intel based computers, so that means that I could install it on my computer, alongside of Microsoft Windows.

I saved some money up and bought of a copy of BeOS v3.1. I must say, it was amazing! This was 1999 and the operating system was years ahead of itself (and in some ways, it still is). Out of the box BeOS supported muiltiple CPUs, CD burners (no buying a program to do it as was the norm then), and multi-threading (which meant that a crashed program wouldn't bring down the whole computer). There were a million things that the BeOS did that Windows and the MacOS couldn't do.

I was particularly fond of the forethought put into the BeOS. There was a feature called "Translators". Translators were small pieces of code that when dropped into the appropriate folder allowed all programs to use the new feature. For example, there were three or four graphics editing programs available for BeOS. None of them supported the PhotoShop file format (.psd), but an avid BeOS user wrote a transloter for the PSD format and now every graphics program could read and write PSD files. It was so genious!

The problem that Be Inc. ran into wasn't technical, it was business. Be Inc. tried to get vendors to sell computers with the BeOS installed, even alongside of Windows, but because Microsoft had such a strong arm on the industry (and still does to this day), they could never get a single large vendor to sell BeOS preinstalled on a PC. Microsoft's monopoloy had stifled progress and competition. Be Inc. tried to stick it out as long as they could, but they eventually were bought out and broken up by Palm Inc.

I continued to use the BeOS as my main computer for the next few years. It was only then that I had to get back into the Windows world to advance my career. It's too bad, as the BeOS engineers knew what they were doing. I only hope that the community can bring back that innovativeness that the BeOS was leading the world with.