What is BeOS? Who makes it?

The Be Operating System is designed with the futurist user
foremost in mind. Media creation/consumption may be
BeOS's true forte, but no one can live inside a system
devoid of email, spreadsheets, and word processors.
Those applications are stapled in almost every user's daily
diet. Just because BeOS is billed as the MediaOS, that
doesn't mean it's somehow sub-optimal at handling more
mundane chores.

Hardware manufacturers of the world can churn out
speedy hardware faster than we (or our wallets) can keep
up with. But what good is a 1 GHz machine if the
operating system you run on it keeps on crashing because
it's so tangled and bloated with old code from
programmers who never collaborated much. Why order a
spanking new Porsche only to install Buick seats and a
Volkswagen suspension.

Operating systems like MacOS and Windows were not
designed to be fully modular, BeOS is. Preemptive
multitasking in BeOS is implemented automatically and
transparently, unlike Windows and MacOS.

BeOS uses pervasive multithreading, meaning that it will
break up large tasks into lots of tiny tasks, thereby
increasing the flow rate of data through the system while
reducing the time that tasks must wait for the processor.
Windows does not multithread much at all.

BeOS makes use of 8 processors simultaneously and
symmetrically out of the box, only Windows NT can do
four (not as well), and for an extra couple hundred dollars.
BeOS’s symmetric multiprocessing is distributed evenly
and automatically, so if one CPU is busy the current task
will be sent to others, therefore BeOS uses around 99.9%
or greater. Moreover, Windows does not take full
advantage of the multiple CPU’s in fact only 80%
(approximately) at best, which is a big difference when the
rest is being wasted.

Drivers are installed unadorned to the user in BeOS, the
drivers are not peculiarly installed from a large database
usually unnecessarily taking up space like on Windows.
Instead they are automatically detected and initialized in
the first boot sequence.

Although almost unknown to Windows users, not always
are there drivers available for every piece of hardware.
But this is not the fault of the developers for BeOS, since
there are not very many. Even though many third party
and independent developers have been working to make
the most widely used hardware compatible for BeOS.
Most hardware companies do not want to make drivers
for BeOS on their own (which is understandable). The
best bet is to build a system that is fully compatible with
BeOS. Check with BeOS’s website for compatibility lists.

And sure, most of the programs that you use in Windows
or MacOS are not available, and that's probably not going
to change. There are well over a million software titles for
Windows and Macintosh, and less then a percent will be
ported to BeOS. The real reason is not because of the
massive amounts of software, but how the code is written.
Windows is DOS, except with more dynamic link libraries
or DLL's (most are no longer used). For Windows users,
this is good (even though it's big), because they can use
almost any program written for a Microsoft based
operating system.

Since its modular and POSIX compliant, almost any
UNIX or Linux based software can be easily ported with
the fully functional C/C++ compiler that comes with BeOS
called IDE. The full version of BeOS comes with plenty of
sample code.

BeOS is reliable, you can run BeOS without restarting,
Windows 9x must be restarted at the least once a week
so it can clear its registry, or once a day for peek
performance, MacOS is about the same. Windows NT 4,
and 2000 can be run for a long time, however it is
recommended to completely restart the machine once a
month.

The Professional version alone costs about $50 and has
many package deals with the Gobe Productive 2.0 office
suite, or with the BeOS Bible by Scot Hacker, or both for
about $120. The price for BeOS is very affordable
compared to Windows ME full version, which is more
then twice as much, and Windows 2000 is more then
three times as much for the basic version.

BeOS R5 is downloadable from http://free.be.com/ and
runs alongside Windows. It is almost 50 megabytes and it
is free. No version of Windows can be downloaded
(legally at least), and only an older version of MacOS
such as 7.5.3 is available from Apple's FTP server.

BeOS's Website is at:
http://www.be.com
To get BeOS go to Gobe:
http://www.gobe.com
BeBits software database is:
http://www.bebits.com
For news on BeOS go to:
http://www.benews.com
or
http://www.begroovy.com

Great answer since I do not know much about
Be either (I figured it had to be better than
windows because what isin't!) my only
question is what types of audio editing progs
are out for BE I work in the recording
insustry and we use Mac for everything
because Protools is the greatest program for
studio work multi tracking/ mastering
etc....... is there anything as good for BE?

I've tried BeOS, and I love it. It's extremely fast, reliable, and stable. It boots in 15 seconds and all programs load instantly with no waiting. In the number of times that I've tried, I have not been able to make it run slow, get lagged, or crash. As a simple test, I took 5 MP3s and some MPEGs and played them all at once. They all played fine. No skipping or pausing. And other programs still loaded instantly. Try doing that in Windows.
In addition, all hardware installed itself, and I didn't have to do anything, select a driver, tweak settings, etc.

There aren't many things out there for BeOS. But it is really designed for extensive audio and video manipulation. I had 29 mp3's playing at once and nothing crashed. at 30, it was a slightly different story. If you would like to see what's out there, go to www.bebits.com

Beos is a great product. No compatibility legacy to deal with (reason windows sits on an outdated kernel) imagine if your company spent thousands of dollars for the new OS that came out and the next year BAM they make something new that doesnt work for YOU! This is the problem microsoft/mac struggles with. If beos survives they too will face this one day. Dont get me wrong i use/love beos but please dont jump on the "windows sux just because" bandwagon. Anyone remember the beta recorders? Much better than the VHS but who won? Remember the atari 5200? this product in my opinion was the beginning of the end for atari and was a template for other tech companies to follow. This product was atari's attempt at getting the consumers who had invested money into the 2600 VCS to roll out some more cash and throw away the "old" stuff. They tried to revive it with the 7800 which allowed you to play the old and the new but they forgot about the 5200. Then nintendo came around and forced them out of the picture! So when your mad at the next new OS for not supporting your email client in the new version remember atari!:)

LOL. BeOS is the best of both worlds: ease of use & unix stability. With a decent skin, it can look as good as OS X. The problem being is lack of applications. Useful ones if I may. True about 15 seconds startup time.

beos comes with some pretty damn awesome sound editing apps right out of the box! 3dmix is included in the pro and pe releases of beos 5.it takes a little while to figure out because there is no real help files or documentation bundled with it, but between it and the native sound recorder in beos, you basicly have all you need to do multi track recording and mixing ,add to that plenty of midi seqencing and rhythm (drummachine)type apps,and the awesome shareware soundplayer called soundplay(the best$12 you'll ever spend(this puppy comes with pitch changing,reverbs,echo,eq,and the ability to play any sound file BACKWARDS in real time!even a song right off a cd,you can record off the line out of your soundcard(if you have a soundblaster live,to put fx on a track and drag it into 3dmix to mix it with other tracks ,not only that the beos has such good multitasking abilities you can runseveral of these apps at once with no problem even on a very modest pc,i have run 4 or 5 sound apps at once doing different things on a pc with an amd k62 333 processor and 32 megs ram wihout crashing it ( altho things tend to skip a bit at first until things level out some! i'm running a celeron450 with 128 megs ram now and i can do just about anything!the user interface in 3dmix must be seen to be believed! you mix your sound by dragging multicolored columns around in a virtual 3d 'room' hit alt p and rainbow sparks shoot out of the columns in time to the music,wherever you drag the column,is where the track is in the mix,you can drag things aruond while saving the file for some neat panning effects! add to this a linear view window where you can cut ,paste,add fx,add more tracks,etc.(the number of tracks and lengths of songs seems only to be limited by the amount of ram and processor power!you can drag and drop tracks and sound clips from the native sound recorer or any other sound file source right onto the linear screen of 3d mix to open them,from there go to the mixer window to manipulate them in the mix,it's really easy once you catch on! you can get soundplay and varios other sound apps at www.bebits.com or www.boostsignal.com

I dont know anything about be, but can you run be and windows me on the same machine, with 1 hard drive?? if this is a dumb question, then please forgive me....thanks!!

Yep it can run, but not sure for the pro edition.
the only thing that i cannot make to work is my cnet "fast ethernet card 10/100"
im connected to my isp using it (network connection)

can anybody help?
my network card doesn't display in preferences/network!
i tried with the ones that display (3com ..)
but it didn't work!

any help could be apriciated
(my language isn't english,so sorry about writing bad)

HOW DO I INSTALL MY TRIDENT 9440 VIDEO CARD AND MY SOUND BLASTER 16 PCI ON BEOS 5 DO L NEED TO BACKUP AND REINSTALL THE BACKEWD UP FILES ON BEOS 5 PLZZ L LOVE BEOS 5 BUT L NEED THESE QUESTIONS AND DO MY KB WON,T WORK OKKKKK THANKZ IF U CAN HELP @@@@

Is BeOS developed from UNIX? Is BeOS one of those
Linux OSes, like Redhat, Mandrake? Basically, the
interface is almost the same with the X-window in
UNIX and LINUX. I just installed BeOS on my PC, and
it works great! Fast, so perfect, and the great
thing is FREE. I think those OSes by Mr. Gates are
crappy. Seriously.