Posted on August 14, 2009 by by jr

In my net travels I came across the following video on YouTube (in two parts) that gives a fascinating demonstration of the now defunct BeOS operating system.

What caught my eye was the fact that this video is at least a decade old, and the hardware configuration was a dual Intel Pentium II-266 processor with 64Mb RAM (Megabytes NOT Gigabytes), a 3GB hard disk drive, 2x $70.00 Hauppage video capture cards and a standard video controller of the day (hazarding a guess probably not more than a 16Mb card). Today you can’t even donate a computer of that specification to a charity – its considered junk!

Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.51/4.0 (considered bleeding edge at that time) was not even close to performing anything comparable on the same hardware, and even today reasonably high specification equipment is required to undertake equivalent heavy duty multimedia operations.

Though the presentation is a bit dry in places, it is absolutely amazing what performance in terms of processing power and graphics handling the BeOS operating system was capable of.  There is a fascinating back story on the history of the BeOS operating system and it’s creator was a former Apple employee Jean-Louis Gassée. BeOS may have been the basis of Apple’s OS/X had they not bought NeXT and it’s NeXTSTEP operating system.

BeOS lives on today as the last stable version of the OS which was 5.0.3. This version has dwindling hardware support for today’s modern technology (as the technology has moved on significantly since then) and whilst there have been attempts to continue developing the operating system in the Open Source community… that too now has almost come to a complete halt.

One can only imagine what this operating system could have been today had events in history been different.

Part 1/2

Part 2/2

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