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A Power Macintosh 8500/120 running BeOS R3

  • First released: October 1995 (Developer Release 5)
  • Final release: 5.0.3, May 2000

Be Inc was founded in 1990 by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée and engineer Steve Sakoman. They developed a new operating system, BeOS, initially to run on the AT&T Hobbit processor but soon ported to PowerPC. They began by creating their own computer (the BeBox), but BeOS was later able to run on Mac clones and even Apple Macintoshes. However, Apple resisted providing Be with information they needed to allow it to run on newer hardware, meaning that after the end of the clone program and the introduction of the new G3 processor architecture, BeOS was unable to support new Macintoshes.

Apple considered acquiring Be Inc so that BeOS could be the foundation of a next-generation Mac operating system. Apple ended up choosing NeXT instead, with reasons given including a lack of printer support in BeOS, a high asking price from Gassée, and influence from Steve Jobs. After this, BeOS struggled to compete against Windows, Mac OS, and the up-and-coming Linux. Be Inc was bought by Palm Inc in 2001 and then dissolved. In the same year, development began on an open-source reimplementation of BeOS, Haiku. Haiku is still in active development today, and it runs on modern Intel machines.

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