BeOS, A Tribute

Date: 11/13/01 4:59 PM

Subject: Consolation

To all those at Be:

"Thanks for the ride." When Be first came on the scene in 1990 I was just getting into programming and finishing up high school. Then in 1996 I had my first taste of BeOS. It was an incredible and delicious taste which I have never forgotten. Since then I have followed the happenings at Be with eager interest always hoping that the wonderful advances and incredible code-base would be seen for it's glorious devotion to multimedia performance beyond all competitors that it would be snapped up and adopted by a large corporation or adopted by multimedia content creators. Unfortunately, these hopes were never realized.

Today, I visited the website in hopes of finding a growing thriving company and perhaps a new version of BeOS for the home user. I tried 5 and it is truly glorious: fast, responsive, easy to navigate, easy to install. I had hoped to get the personal edition and some third party software and perhaps use it at home for (in the future) watching movies on DVD, editing and maintaining my home music collection, and creating and storing my home movies. Instead I found the painful announcement of the dissolution of Be. "The stockholders of Be have also approved the proposed dissolution of Be pursuant to the terms of a plan of dissolution."

I remember still with fondness the great vision of the multimedia future with BeBox running BeOS taking the lead as fast and efficient tools used by industry professionals to create the digital future. I caught a little bit of that vision and tried to share it with others, always explaining, then showing the demos and trying to help them see the vision too. I still want that vision to come true. The Redmond based OS just isn't as sleek, stylish, user-friendly, or efficient. The penguin, while I do prefer it over Redmond, is just too much of a server OS to really be what BeOS is. BeOS has left me with a profound sense of home and comfort that will terribly scar me for life as I compare all others to it. I might be going a little bit overboard, but I truly -felt- good using BeOS. Neither, Windows with its slow interface and unpredictable behavior nor Linux distributions with their clumsy and cluttered configurations and (for now) weak windowing managers have ever measured up to the simple experience that I had with BeOS. The BeOS interface, clean and straight forward, simple, efficient, responsive, and a great gui driving a great os, the gui being part of the os (not a clumsy add-on like the redmond or penguin) provided an incredible dream that I haven't seen topped yet.

Well this has been a long slow rambling, I've repeated myself several times, and I'm sure I've lost the interest of most potential readers. But, thanks. It's been great and I hope that Palm has some good plans going forward that will actually use BeOS and take advantage of its strengths.

And once again, thanks,

Skip

Software Engineer and confessed BeOS admirer

(always secretly hoping it would take over the desktop world)