A somewhat cool, non-free Operating System from Be, Inc. (www.beincorporated.com 
). Was particularly good with handling audio and video (though it lacked support for certain popular codecs, particularly Quick Time). It was pervasively multi-threaded, with multiprocessor support up to 16 processors (others were theoretically possible; the system was limited to 16 because they hadn't tested it beyond that), and used a Tagged Database File System that was ahead of its time.
Be's API was a pleasure to use- it's amazing what can be done when you start from scratch.
Unfortunately, Be, Inc. was dissolved in November of 2001. It is still (!) involved in a court case with Micro Soft, insisting that MS materially hurt BeOS's chances for success, thanks to MS's allegedly anti-competitive OEM practices. There is a spectacular example in Be's history of why they make this claim.
You used to be able to get it for free if you promised not to make money with it, at free.be.com but that site is now down.
See also: www.befaqs.com (FAQ) for an explanation of why Palm was interested in Be.
Furtherless, the rumor in 2010 is that Palm is also not long for this world...
Actually, as of September 2003, Be have settled their suit with Microsoft (www.theregister.co.uk ). IMHO this is a tragedy. A large part of Be's demise was due to Microsoft's anti-competitive marketing practises, and to sell out for a few pieces of silver rather than to have it come out in court is a huge waste. I bought a copy of Be, and wish it still lived. Imagine an OS slightly cooler than MacOS X, that you could run on cheap hardware... -- Robert Atkins
Initially, Be developed BeOS. Later, it developed BeIA, which was based on Be Os, but was targeted at embedded devices. It then laid off a number of employees and focused the rest on BeIA. Then, in late 2001, Palm Source bought the assets and hired key staff (meaning BeIA engineers since that is all that was left, marketing and support staff having been laid off some time ago). Be Os may or may not have reached its End Of Life.
Be was moving forward quickly in media fields, and then they announced their Internet Appliance strategy that had many software houses worried that they would be abandoned if they continued developing for Be. Officially, Be's position was that BeOS was not being abandoned; simply that the company was forced to concentrate its resources on something that actually had a competitive chance.
I just set up a new computer to run Windows and BeOS. My only other non-linux machine is a 486. Anyway, once I get BeOS installed (it was, but I had to reinstall Windows due to a driver conflict before I actually used Be on it), it will probably spend most of it's time in BeOS. Maybe. Due to poor graphics card, the machine isn't any good for playing 3D games, so the only real reason for me to run Windows on the machine is to play DVDs. Otherwise, it should be all BeOS.
Seems to be Unix under the hood. Try opening a terminal window. It has a bash shell and Unix directory structure. Does anyone know more about this?
It's Posix Standard compliant, so it has a notion of users and groups and all sorts of other unix stuff, but it isn't unix.
Actually, a very cool OS. And while it tries to look a bit like Unix in terms of directory structure and use of the bash shell, it's based on a completely different kernel and windowing system.
It's written in C++, completely multithreaded from the ground up, "optimized for media applications" (whatever that means - to me, it means it does video very well), and handles huge files with ease. [BeOS is capable of handling 64 bits at a time, which makes it much better at handling multimedia applications]
There is a freely (as in Beer) available version on www.be.com [Broken Link], although I found it worth paying for. -- Burkhard Kloss
Seems to now be available at www.bebits.com . Free As In Beer and all that, but better than nothing.
A couple of months before selling its IP to Palm, Be licensed the latest version of Be Os to yellowTab (www.yellowtab.com ). A new version of Be Os, Zeta Os, should be released around April '03
Don't forget the open source reimplementation of the whole OS for the x86 platform: www.openbeos.org
It's a humongous project, but they seem to be making real progress!
Sony picked Be for a new internet appliance, as reported at news.cnet.com
Haiku Os, found at www.haiku-os.org , is currently (2011) the Be Os clone making the most progress, and is Open Source to boot. It may feel a bit dated (the Graphical User Interface is much like the original Be Os, for example) but it is reliable and you can get from Boot Loader to desktop in under a second with a fast disk. A Live Cd can be downloaded form the site, and it runs well in qemu and on actual hardware.
See original on c2.com