Haiku - Part 2

If you haven't read part one, you can do so by clicking here

Lets pick up where we left off shall we?

...Jean-Louis asked for far too much money prompting apple to buy NeXTSTEP. So Be inc. went back to the drawing board to create a system that could be run on Apple computers, with intentions of selling it separately, as an option for Apple owners. There was a problem. Apple, who apparently were still sore about the ridiculous price that BeOS had been offered to them, went on the defensive and refused to release certain specifications about their G3 computers to Be inc. This made developing a version of BeOS that would run on these computers next to impossible.

Be inc was failing fast, but they had another potential market. Power Computing released a machine that could dual boot Mac and BeOS. For a while, it shipped with BeOS and Mac, offering the customer the choice. Unfortunately this venture ultimately failed.

Even to it's very last ounce of strength BeOS attempted to drag itself out of the hole of debt it had dug itself through it's failed projects by releasing R5 which was completely free (as in money) and could run on the X86 or Power PC platform (BeOS had been available to X86 since R3) architecture under Linux and Windows. Although thousands of programs were developed, it never made it past a small collection of hobbyists. Eventually in the midst of rising debt, the company couldn't hold out any longer. Be inc. was sold to Palm for a mere 5% of what Jean-Louis had asked Apple for. It's final release, codename Dano, was still under development when Be was bought. Like a good captain, Jean-Louis went down with the ship, staying on until the transition was complete, one year after the sale.

That concludes the history lesson for today, but I'd like to share some R5 screenshots with you from Virtual box. R5 is still available for download from BeBits.com, which is the certainly the largest online BeOS community. This link will help you if you want to boot it up on your VB. I must warn you, BeOS was not designed for modern computers so expect it to be unstable and to be incompatible with some of your hardware.

Here the some screen shots that I took from VB:

Part 3 coming soon - perhaps we'll even talk about the namesake of this series!!! If you have any comments or corrections (could happen) drop me a line - thethothonfoss@gmail.com

-The Thoth-