Haiku - Part 1

Haiku. The word brings to mind elegance and simplicity. This word traditionally used to describe a 3 lined Japanese poem has a new meaning, and it's way cooler than poetry. Some of you may have guessed that I am talking about the Haiku Operating System based off of BeOS. In this series of posts I hope to enlighten you about the history of Haiku.

To examine Haiku, first we have to look at BeOS, which Haiku is modeled after. BeOs sprung to life in 1991, the brainchild of former Apple employee Jean-Louis Gassée. His vision was to create brand new hardware and software aimed at the production and editing of digital media. BeOS was written in C++ for ease and used its own journaling 64-bit fs called Bfs (Be File System). Keeping with the established theme, the GUI was clean looking. BeOS was originally written to run on their own hardware, the BeBox. This machine was a step foward in computer technology boasting dual processors and blinkenlights which indicated CPU load. Unfortunately only about 2000 of this fantastic machines were made before production stopped so that Be could focus entirely on BeOS. It is a this point that Be inc. started to develop BeOS for Apple computers. There was speculation that Apple would purchase BeOS to replace their operating system, but this fell short when Jean-Louis asked for far too much money, prompting Apple to buy NeXTSTEP.

That concludes Part 1. If you want more info about the BeBox, check out the Wikipedia page here.

Cheers,

-The Thoth-