Once all the parts had been nailed down, Phipps replaced the BeOS screen saver with the open-source version, and much to everyone's surprise and delight, it worked. Among other things, it has to constantly monitor activity on the keyboard and mouse, load the screen-saver settings at the right times, and ask for a password when the screen saver is turned off. One of the first chunks of code that the volunteers tackled was the screen-saver kit, which has a very simple function but also a lot of moving parts. Tracker and Deskbar, which are equivalent to Windows' Explorer and Taskbar and to OS X's Finder and Dock. A few pieces of BeOS had already been released by Be as open source, such as the The operating system is also the means by which programmers give instructions to the hardware.įortunately, BeOS had been written in a modular fashion, making it relatively straightforward to develop, test, and then replace each component of BeOS with its open-source equivalent. Much like the layers of a cake, a computer system consists of the hardware, an operating system that manages the hardware, and the applications that run within the operating system, such as Web browsers, document editors, and fun things like games. Linux came to be, as well as the Free Software Foundation's GNU software, from the Gnu C Compiler to GnuCash, an accounting program. Re-creating such a system with an all-volunteer crew working in their free time was a crazy idea. Some of the most gifted engineers in Silicon Valley had developed the software over the course of more than 10 years. An operating system is extremely complex, especially one as comprehensive as BeOS, whose various layers and applications had all been designed from the ground up to work together. Still, Phipps and those who joined him had their work cut out for them. In 2001, Palm acquired Be for a reported US $11 million. The company eventually released a stripped-down version of BeOS for Internet appliances, but it wasn't enough. At one pointĪpple even considered BeOS as a replacement for its own operating system. BeOS, on the other hand, quickly found a small yet loyal following, and it was soon running on Intel x86-based PCs and Macintosh PowerPC clones. Released in October 1995, the BeBox didn't last long. Finding no other operating system that met their needs, the Be engineers wrote their own. The company's first product was a desktop computer called the BeBox. In particular, they sought to escape the backward-compatibility trap they'd witnessed at Apple, where every new version of hardware and software had to take into account years of legacy systems, warts and all. because they wanted to create a new kind of computer. In 1991, a Frenchman named Jean-Louis Gassée and several other former Apple employees founded Be Inc. Let's take a look at why that is, how Haiku came to be, and whether the operating system running on your computer really performs as well as it should.įirst, a little history. What's more, Haiku, unlike its more established competitors, is exceedingly good at tackling one of the toughest challenges of modern computing: multicore microprocessors. For both users and developers, the experience of running Haiku is incredibly consistent, and like BeOS, it is fast, responsive, and efficient. Indeed, of all the many alternative operating systems now in the works, Haiku is probably the best positioned to challenge the mainstream operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. Many of those who have done so comment that even the alpha releases of Haiku feel as stable as the final release of some other software. An open-source system, he reasoned, isn't owned by any one company or person, and so it can't disappear just because a business goes belly-up or key developers leave.Įven now, anybody can install and run the operating system on an Intel Worried that under a new owner BeOS would die a slow, unsupported death, Phipps did the only logical thing he could think of: He decided to re-create BeOS completely from scratch, but as open-source code. The company that had created BeOS couldn't cut it in the marketplace, and its assets, including BeOS, were being sold to a competitor. In short, we found it vastly superior to every other computer operating system available. It ran amazingly fast on the hardware of its day it had a clean, intuitive user interface and it offered a rich, fun, and modern programming environment. Having an emotional attachment to a piece of software may strike you as odd, but to Phipps and many others (including me), BeOS deserved it. It was the summer of 2001, and computer programmer Michael Phipps had a problem: His favorite operating system, BeOS, was about to go extinct.
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