BeOS is reborn as the open source Haiku Operating System
Fun, Retro - October 19th, 2009 - 2 Comments
Remember BeOS? If you don’t that’s ok, it came out around 1995 and even though its performance was leaps and bounds above Mac OS System 8 and Windows 95, it never quite caught on, so it died off and seemingly disappeared. Now BeOS is reborn as Haiku, an open source lightweight operating system. It’s certainly more of a novelty at this point, but it’s kind of fun to play around with in a retro sort of way, and who knows maybe it will give Linux a run for it’s money? Well probably not since they’re both free. Anyway, check out Haiku, you can download it as an installable ISO, a VMWare image, or a live boot CD.
I couldn’t get it to work in Parallels, but I replaced OS X with Haiku on my Dell Mini 9!
Works well enough to play with, but no wireless still.
I ran BeOS on my PowerMac 8500. It came with Metrowerks C++/Java compilers (later Java was dropped). Probably not a lot of Mac users remember that BeOS was the forerunner for the MacOS Classic successor… until NeXT’s Steve Jobs recommended against it and, oh, by the way, perhaps Apple should buy NeXT instead.