Be is Back
BeOS. Do you remember BeOS? Probably not. Not many people do. It never really caught on very well, unfortunately. Be was sold to Palm, Inc sometime after the release of version 5, and since then it hasn’t gone anywhere. There have been some off-shoots - developers toying with the free Personal Edition made available based on version 5 sometime before the buy-out by Palm. Somehow, though, a company called yellowTab has managed to get their hands on the development source code for version 6 and they seem to be redeveloping it. With a desktop that is this pretty who needs MacOS X or KDE? Keep in mind, that the yellowTab/BeOS 6 screenshot above is basically what it looked like when I was playing around with BeOS 5 which was probably sometime in 1999. Take that XP. It’s slick, powerful, based on BSD, and does a helluva lot for a not-very-well-known desktop operating system. A full story about the yellowTab release is available here. Unfortunately, application support wasn’t huge when I was playing with it, and I’m a little too hooked on Linux now to run BeOS again. Still, though, it’s an amazing little operating system. If you think XP or OS X has rounded mouldings, plush carpet the relaxes even the most tired feet, a colour scheme that beats even Debbie Travis, and a slick intuitive UI, then you haven’t seen BeOS. No kidding.
