Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Haiku for Me, Haiku for You, Too.


Working at the Big Red Q was an opportunity to see a lot of cool stuff, and then pull my hair out when nobody paid attention. To be fair, the company was running on borrowed time (if only I had known then) and was only interested in what Dell was introducing next quarter so they could at least look like they were keeping up.

One of those cool things was BeOS. These guys had a multi-tasking OS that booted in 4 seconds from a hard drive, would fit on a floppy, run in a few hundred K of RAM, had a tough-as-nails journaling file system, and a wicked cool user interface. And nobody was interested. Not with the fantastic possibilities that Microsoft was promising* with Windows ME. So BeOS got kicked to the curb and finally folded.

Now, after 8 years, some really dedicated people have an alpha release of Haiku, which is BeOS rising from the ashes like a somewhat procrastinating Phoenix.

If you ever used Be, then this is cool news. If you haven't, then you may have a copy of Haiku in your future if you really want to squeeze some performance out of that cheap netbook you bought on impulse during some late night Woot-off (no, not me. Never).

Check out the links.

Footnotes:
* promise (n, v) An oath or delcaration to perform a stated act or duty, as in "If you continue to talk to BeOS we promise to cut your bulk pricing discount to zero. Its a nice little factory here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it, capice?"