BeOS

Summary

BeOS is a fast, easy to use operating system designed especially for multimedia. It was written from scratch in the mid 1990's, making it more suited to modern computing demands than other widely available operating systems, such as UNIX, Windows, and MacOS. Reviewers have indicated that these latter two operating systems are slow and unresponsive compared to BeOS.

Background

In the mid 1990's, members of Apple Computers broke off to found their own company: Be Inc. The things that computers were asked to do had changed significantly in the last few years: multimedia applications were becoming more common, and more complex, computers were being networked together more frequently, especially over the Internet, and processors had become less expensive, making multiprocessor based systems more viable.

UNIX had been designed to support networking and multiple processors. However, it was originally a text based operating system, with graphics and multimedia capabilities added in later.

Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows 98 are all based on DOS, a text-based operating system originally intended for stand-alone computers running single processors. While graphics and networking capabilities were later added, the need to maintain backward compatibility introduced considerable complications. Windows NT is largely based on VAX operating systems. While NT, unlike Windows 95 or 98, is able to support multiple processors, its text-based origin introduces the same types of multimedia issues present with Windows 95 and 98. The integration of a web browser into Windows, done more for marketing than technical reasons, made Windows computers even slower, while decreasing their reliability.

The current MacOS has its roots in an operating system created in the early to mid 1980's. Unlike UNIX and DOS/Windows operating systems, the MacOS had been designed from the ground up as a graphics-based operating system. However, it was originally designed for stand-alone Mac machines running applications that are fairly primitive by today's standards. Early Macs did not play movies, graphics programs were limited by today's standards, and the Internet did not yet exist.