BeOS for Not Yet Techies 2

BeOS was started by Jean-Louis Gassee, who essentially had the same idea I did, of designing an operating system unchained by the past, ready to face the future. Unlike me, he had the technical knowledge and business experience and contacts to follow through with his vision, and created it.

The first version came out in 1996, and is now on BeOS 5.0.

You can try it out for free. Just go to Be, Inc and download it.

Amazingly, you install BeOS under a directory on your Windows C drive.

BeOS is well situated to take advantage of the coming age of computers, the convergence of all communications equipment and media with the personal computer.

Since it is designed to use RAM most efficiently at the optimum speed, Beos stands a good chance of becoming the operating system of user choice when bandwidth increases to the point that we can easily deal not only with large MP3 or other audio files but multimedia presentations and even movies. This is technically known as convergence, and BEOS unlike Windows and even Linux is not only ready, it's designed for it.

Linux has a lot of fanatical proponents, but their fanaticism for open source software, although their goal for overturning Microsoft's dominance of the PC OS marketplace, is also Linux's weakness.

Businesses need to make a profit even when they're selling tools to overthrow the establishment.

Since BEOS is owned by Be, Inc, they are obviously in business for a profit and have no intention of letting just any teenaged geek change the operating system itself, although they do encourage third-party development of software that works on it.

Be is encouraging people to download the personal version of Beos for free to spread the word and increase its general popularity, but it charges for all commercial use and for is making money for adapting it to Internet appliances. These are bound to grow in number in the future.

On a more technical level, BeOS is 95% written in the C language and some in assembler. It is completely object oriented, a must for modern day programming.

Some of BeOS's distinguishing characteristics include:

• Preemptive multitasking
• Pervasive multithreading
• 64 bit multithreaded file system

If you have any interest in learning more about BeOS, just download it and check it out.

As a career option, I don't see huge potential at this point, except of course working for Be, Inc itself and for any third party company writing software for it.

Next: Bash Shell