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Old Operating Systems Don’t Die…

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 3 comments
Technologizer; By Harry McCracken
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Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago. (If I recall correctly, I compared it with Windows 98 and an early version of Red Hat Linux.) It’s certainly a happier development than we’re accustomed to hearing about BeOS, a product which failed to become the next-generation Mac OS back in the 1990s and was then sold to Palm for a measly $11 million, whereupon it pretty much vanished except for the occasional legal aftershock.

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Comments (3)

Before I was a Linux user, and way before I was a Linux professional, I was an OS/2 user. It was light years ahead of the Windows offerings of the day. If it weren't for the steep price tag and the limited availability of applications I might just be interested in eCommStation.

I never did get into BeOS. If Haiku has adequate hardware support it might be interesting to try it out.
I've seen Haiku at their SCALE booth, and while it looks good, I'm not hopeful that they'll ever get enough developers interested in working on it to make it work.

That said, I think it's HUGELY important for there to be more OS alternatives out there, especially ones that aren't Unix based so we have some variety.
I followed the link through from the article and learned that Haiku has no WiFi stack. No WiFi; no interest by me.

I certainly hope you're wrong about their ability to attract developers but I fear you are probably right.

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