Before the whole thing collapsed, I was using BeOS for my desktop at home and had a skunkworks project going on at work trying to demonstrate BeOS as platform for our diagnostic devices.<p>We were transitioning from a 2-line, 32-char LCD display to QVGA colour touch screen and the experience was become painful. I really thought I had found a much better alternative than the RTEMS, VxWorks, and Windows based options we were looking at.<p>And then it seemed like everything fell apart. I don't actually remember if it was Be Inc, or what I was working on and then where I was working that folded first but for me it was like a very long line of falling dominoes resulting in a lot of interesting and promising tech being abandoned.<p>Worse, after all the dust settled in my professional career, all that was replaced with stuff with a lot more familiar names but that was more difficult to get right. It pains me to even say it but I worked on four projects over six or seven years that never made it out of R&D.
I was on the BeOS team for many years.
While we did many interesting things, and especially kernel and driver layers were more modern than the alternatives, Palm threw away those pieces. If I were to build (or fund) a new OS today, I'd drive the state if the art forward.<p>Especially the GUI layer is too reliant on '80s style implementation inheritance, rather than fast, strict protocols and minimal abstraction costs.
I have used BeOS 5 & HaikuOS as my no distraction operating systems. It can't do much, but it has a text editor, c compiler, and a web browser that is sufficient for most documentation and Safari.<p>It always runs quite fast compared to a lightweight Linux distro.
As someone who played with BeOS in my younger days; I'm pretty curious about this project, does this use any of BeOS's code or is this a reimplementation of BeOS ideas with it's own codebase?