Discontinued operating system for personal computers
Operating system
BeOS
is a discontinued
operating system
for
personal computers
that was developed by
Be Inc.
[2]
It was conceived for the company's
BeBox
personal computer which was released in 1995. BeOS was designed for
multitasking
,
multithreading
, and a
graphical user interface
. The OS was later sold to
OEMs
, retail, and directly to users; its last version was released as
freeware
.
Early BeOS releases are for
PowerPC
. It was ported to
Macintosh
and then
x86
. Be was ultimately unable to achieve a significant market share and ended development with dwindling finances, so
Palm
acquired the BeOS assets in 2001. Enthusiasts have since created derivate operating systems including
Haiku
, which retains BeOS 5 compatibility.
Development
[
edit
]
BeOS is the product of former
Apple Computer
's
Jean-Louis Gassee
, with the underlying philosophy of building a "media OS" capable of up-and-coming digital media
[3]
and multi-processors. Development began in the early 1990s, initially designed to run on
AT&T Hobbit
-based hardware before being modified to run on
PowerPC
-based processors: first Be's own
BeBox
system, and later Apple Computer's
PowerPC Reference Platform
and
Common Hardware Reference Platform
, with the hope that Apple would purchase or license BeOS as a replacement for its aging
Mac OS
.
[4]
The first version of BeOS shipped with the BeBox to a limited number of developers in October 1995. It supported analog and digital audio and
MIDI
streams, multiple video sources, and 3D computation.
[5]
Developer Release 6 (DR6) was the first officially available version.
The BeOS Developer Release 7 (DR7) was released in April 1996. This includes full 32-bit color graphics, "workspaces" (
virtual desktops
), an
FTP
file server, and a
web server
.
[6]
DR8 was released in September 1996 with a new browser with
MPEG
and
QuickTime
video formats. It supports
OpenGL
,
remote access
,
[7]
and
Power Macintosh
.
[8]
In 1996, Apple Computer CEO
Gil Amelio
started negotiations to buy Be Inc., but stalled when Be CEO
Jean-Louis Gassee
wanted $300 million
[9]
and Apple offered $125 million. Apple's board of directors preferred
NeXTSTEP
and purchased
Steve Jobs
's
NeXT
instead.
[10]
The final developer's release introduced a 64-bit
file system
. BeOS Preview Release (PR1), the first for the general public, was released in mid 1997. It supports
AppleTalk
,
PostScript
printing, and
Unicode
.
[11]
The price for the Full Pack was $49.95. Later that year, Preview Release 2 shipped with support for Macintosh's
Hierarchical File System (HFS)
, support for 512MB RAM, and improvements to the user interface.
[12]
Release 3 (R3) shipped in March 1998 (initially $69.95, later $99.95), as the first to be ported to the
Intel
x86
platform in addition to PowerPC, and the first commercially available version of BeOS.
[13]
The adoption of x86 was partly due to Apple's moves, with Steve Jobs stopping the Macintosh clone market,
[14]
and Be's mounting debt.
[15]
BeOS Release 4 has a claimed performance improvement of up to 30 percent. Keyboard shortcuts were changed to mimic those of Windows
[16]
However it still lacks
Novell NetWare
support.
[17]
It also brought additional drivers and support for the most common
SCSI
controllers on the x86 platform - from Adaptec and Symbios Logic. The bootloader switched from
LILO
to Be's own bootman.
In 2000, BeOS Release 5 (R5) was released. This is split between a Pro Edition, and a free version known as Personal Edition (BeOS PE) which was released for free online and by CD-ROM.
[18]
BeOS PE can be booted from within Windows or
Linux
, and was intended as a consumer and developer preview.
[19]
[20]
Also with R5, Be
open sourced
elements of the user interface.
[21]
Be CEO Gassee said in 2001 that he was open to the idea of releasing the entire operating system's source code,
[22]
but this never materialized.
Release 5 raised BeOS's popularity
[18]
but it remained commercially unsuccessful, and BeOS eventually halted following the introduction of a stripped-down version for
Internet appliances
,
BeIA
, which became the company's business focus in place of BeOS.
[23]
R5 is the final official release of BeOS as Be Inc. became defunct in 2001 following its sale to
Palm Inc.
A BeOS R5.1 "Dano", which was under development before Be's sale to Palm and includes the BeOS Networking Environment (BONE) networking stack,
[24]
was leaked to the public shortly after the company's close.
[25]
Version history table
[
edit
]
Release
|
Date
|
Hardware
|
Developer Release 4
|
Prototype
|
AT&T Hobbit
|
Developer Release 5
|
October 1995
|
PowerPC
|
Developer Release 6
|
January 1996
|
Developer Release 7
|
April 1996
|
Developer Release 8
|
September 1996
|
Developer Release 9
(Advanced Access Preview Release)
|
May 1997
|
Preview Release 1
|
June 1997
|
Preview Release 2
|
October 1997
|
Release 3
|
March 1998
|
PowerPC
and
Intel x86
|
R3.1
|
June 1998
|
R3.2
|
July 1998
|
Release 4
|
November 4, 1998
|
R4.5 ("Genki")
|
June 1999
|
Release 5
("Maui")
Personal Edition/Pro Edition
|
March 2000
|
R5.1 ("Dano")
|
Leaked
|
Intel x86
|
Hardware support and licensees
[
edit
]
After the discontinuation of the BeBox in January 1997,
Power Computing
began bundling BeOS (on a CD-ROM for optional installation) with its line of PowerPC-based
Macintosh clones
. These systems can
dual boot
either
Mac OS
or BeOS, with a start-up screen offering the choice.
[26]
Motorola
also announced in February 1997 that it would bundle BeOS with their Macintosh clones, the
Motorola StarMax
, along with MacOS.
[27]
DayStar Digital
was another licensee.
[28]
BeOS is compatible with many Macintosh models except
PowerBook
.
[29]
With BeOS Release 3 on the x86 platform, the operating system is compatible with most computers that run Windows.
Hitachi
is the first major x86 OEM to ship BeOS, selling the
Hitachi Flora Prius
line in Japan, and
Fujitsu
released the Silverline computers in Germany and the
Nordic
countries.
[30]
Be was unable to attract further manufacturers due to their
Microsoft
contracts. Be closed in 2002, and sued Microsoft, claiming that Hitachi had been dissuaded from selling PCs loaded with BeOS. The case was eventually settled out of court for $23.25 million with no admission of liability on Microsoft's part.
[31]
Architecture
[
edit
]
BeOS was developed as an original product, with a proprietary
kernel
,
symmetric multiprocessing
,
preemptive multitasking
, and pervasive
multithreading
.
[32]
It runs in
protected memory
mode, with a
C++
application framework based on shared libraries and modular code.
[8]
Be initially offered
CodeWarrior
for application development,
[32]
and later
EGCS
.
Its
API
is
object oriented
. The user interface was largely multithreaded: each window ran in its own thread, relying heavily on sending messages to communicate between threads; and these concepts are reflected into the API.
[33]
BeOS uses modern hardware facilities such as modular I/O bandwidth, a multithreaded graphics engine (with the
OpenGL
library), and a
64-bit
journaling file system
named
BFS
supporting files up to one
terabyte
each.
[17]
BeOS has partial
POSIX
compatibility and a
command-line interface
through
Bash
, although internally it is not a
Unix
-derived operating system. Many Unix applications were ported to the BeOS command-line interface.
[34]
BeOS uses
Unicode
as the default GUI encoding, and support for input methods such as
bidirectional text
input was never realized.
Applications
[
edit
]
BeOS is bundled with a unique
web browser
named NetPositive,
[35]
the BeMail
email client
,
[36]
and the PoorMan
web server
[37]
. Be operated the marketplace site BeDepot for the purchase and downloading of software including third party, and a website named BeWare listing apps for the platform. Some third party BeOS apps include the
Gobe Productive
office suite,
[17]
the
Mozilla
project,
[38]
[39]
and multimedia apps like
Cinema 4D
.
[40]
Quake
and
Quake II
were officially ported, and
SimCity 3000
was in development.
[41]
Reception
[
edit
]
Be did not disclose the number of BeOS users, but it was estimated to be running on between 50,000 and 100,000 computers in 1999,
[30]
and Release 5 reportedly had over one million downloads.
[18]
For a time it was viewed as a viable competitor to
Mac OS
and
Windows
, but its status as the "alternative operating system" was quickly surpassed by
Linux
by 1998.
[42]
Reception of the operating system was largely positive citing its true and "reliable" multitasking and support for multiple processors.
[43]
Though its market penetration was low, it gained a niche
multimedia
userbase
[30]
and acceptance by the audio community. Consequently it was styled as a "media OS"
[44]
due to its well-regarded ability to handle audio and video.
[45]
BeOS received significant interest in Japan,
[11]
and was also appealing to
Amiga
developers and users, who were looking for a newer platform.
[46]
BeOS and its successors have been used in media appliances, such as the Edirol DV-7 video editors from
Roland Corporation
, which run on a modified BeOS
[47]
and the Tunetracker Radio Automation software that used to run it on BeOS
[48]
[49]
[50]
and
Zeta
, and it was also sold as a "Station-in-a-Box" with the Zeta operating system included.
[51]
In 2015, Tunetracker released a
Haiku
distribution bundled with its broadcasting software.
[52]
Legacy
[
edit
]
The Tascam SX-1 digital audio recorder runs a heavily modified version of BeOS that will only launch the recording interface software.
[53]
The
RADAR 24, RADAR V and RADAR 6
, hard disk-based, 24-track professional audio recorders from iZ Technology Corporation were based on BeOS 5.
[54]
Magicbox, a manufacturer of signage and broadcast display machines, uses BeOS to power their Aavelin product line.
[55]
Final Scratch
, a 12-inch vinyl timecode record-driven DJ software and hardware system, was first developed on BeOS. The "ProFS" version was sold to a few dozen DJs prior to the 1.0 release, which ran on a Linux virtual partition.
[56]
Spiritual successors
[
edit
]
After BeOS came to an end, Palm created
PalmSource
which used parts of BeOS's multimedia framework for its failed
Palm OS Cobalt
product
[57]
(with the takeover of PalmSource, the BeOS rights were assigned to
Access Co.
[58]
). However, Palm refused the request of BeOS users to license the operating system.
[59]
As a result, a few projects formed to recreate BeOS or its key elements with the eventual goal of then continuing where Be Inc. quit.
BeUnited, a BeOS oriented community, converted itself into a
nonprofit organization
in August 2001
[60]
to "define and promote open specifications for the delivery of the Open Standards BeOS-compatible Operating System (OSBOS) platform".
[61]
ZETA
[
edit
]
Immediately after Palm's purchase of Be, a German company named
yellowTAB
started developing
Zeta
based on the BeOS R5.1 codebase and released it commercially. It was later distributed by
magnussoft
.
[62]
During development by yellowTAB, the company received criticism from the BeOS community for refusing to discuss its legal position with regard to the BeOS codebase.
Access Co.
(which bought
PalmSource
, until then the holder of the intellectual property associated with BeOS) declared that yellowTAB had no right to distribute a modified version of BeOS, and magnussoft was forced to cease distribution of the operating system in 2007.
[63]
Haiku (OpenBeOS)
[
edit
]
Haiku
is a complete
open source
reimplementation of BeOS. It was originally named OpenBeOS and its first release in 2002 was a community update.
[62]
Unlike Cosmoe and BlueEyedOS, it is directly compatible with BeOS applications. It is open source software. As of 2022, it was the only BeOS clone still under development, with the fourth beta in December 2022 still keeping BeOS 5 compatibility in its x86 32-bit images, with an increased number of ported modern drivers and
GTK
apps.
[64]
Others
[
edit
]
BlueEyedOS tried to create a system under
LGPL
based on the
Linux
kernel and an
X server
that is compatible with BeOS. Work began under the name BlueOS in 2001 and a demo CD was released in 2003.
[65]
The project was discontinued in February 2005.
Cosmoe, with an interface like BeOS, was designed by Bill Hayden as an open source operating system based on the source code of
AtheOS
, but using the
Linux kernel
.
[66]
[67]
[68]
ZevenOS was designed to continue where Cosmoe left off.
[69]
BeFree started in 2003, initially developed under
FreeBSD
[70]
and later
Linux
.
[71]
[72]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
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Further reading
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]