Haiku

Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared the way for Jobs's second coming at Apple. How different the tech world would be today if Gassée had said yes to Apple's initial acquisition offer. I wonder how often he thinks about the breakdown of that deal, lo these many years later.

Just like TFA I booted Haiku in VirtualBox... Several years ago I ran the BeOS R5 livedisk, and while this is reminiscent, since I'm running in a virtual environment it falls short.<p>Running BeOS on the metal was amazing - setting a thread to realtime would make it really snappy, and it's just not the same when it's virtualized...<p>Either that or Haiku has some way to go yet - I can't tell...<p>EDIT: you know what? actually, this is still really impressive... it DOES behave a lot like BeOS, and it's alpha... I crashed firefox, and gdb popped right up. I dropped into a shell (bash) and there was a GNU style environment right there. That's actually really cool!

Long ago, I was a beta tester and ran BeOS on a dual ppro 180, for a time, and it was lots of fun, turning processors on and off and bouncing balls between windows. I wish more companies would be as visionary and innovative as Be was, and give us some new, different computing platforms.

I remember installing BeOS when it came out. It was impressive and beautiful, and I really wanted it to catch on. I think I'll give Haiku a spin. With VMware, it'll be much easier this time around.

Man, I remember how badly I wanted a BeBox when they first came out, partly because the hardware was a hobbyist's paradise (a Geek Port, for chrissake), and partly because the UI was so pretty.<p>But, Linux and MacOS have come pretty far in the intervening 12 years, and without any special hardware to go with it, I just can't muster the excitement to mess around with Haiku.

It sure is an impressive piece of software. I hope it catches on, or find itself a niche market.<p>I wonder if they're doing anything for developers to easily leverage pervasive multithreading, the bare bones fine-grained threading can be a pain to deal with.

Geez. All this Be nostalgia lately has had _me_ pining for it, and I've never used it. Gonna try out R5 on my old pentium II. Hopefully it'll replace XP. It seems fitting, as that computer is nothing more than a toy for making art.

I remember installing BeOS back in the day. I was very impressed. Glad to see continued interest. Anyone running with AmigaOS ?

And no furries! Ahh, I love every OSS project that spares me another furry on my app launcher.

Is it just me, or are haikus getting hyped and hyped and hyped even more?