Be Inc. Dead
Be Inc.
KindCompany
Founded1990
Defunct2001
StatusDead
FoundersJean-Louis Gassée
FieldSoftware
Sourcewww.haiku-os.org ↗
Ex-Apple executives' OS startup — the BeBox and BeOS, a media operating system of genuine elegance. Palm bought the ashes in 2001; Haiku keeps the flame.
1960198020002020
Acquired by Palm Computing
Gassée founded Be after Apple ousted him in 1990 — the BeBox dual-PowerPC hardware sold to fund BeOS, a clean-slate media OS with pervasive multithreading, a journaled 64-bit filesystem, and a database-style tracker.
Apple nearly bought it instead of NeXT in 1996–97 (Gassée allegedly held out for more). BeOS moved to x86, then free BeOS R5; the company sold its assets to Palm in November 2001. Haiku OS reimplemented it open-source — beta released 2018, still developed.