Back in the mid to late 90's, there was a company named Be Inc. which produced a computer called the Be Box. This Be Box ran an Operating System developed at Be Inc. called Be OS. Be OS was and still is today considered by many one of the most advanced Operating Systems in existance. Be OS had features that no other OS had at the time or since. Be OS was a pervasive multithreading, Preemptive-Multitasking, Symmetric Multiprocessing OS with protected memory for user and system processes!
Be Inc. and Be OS enjoyed a small but loyal fanbase, many of whom are still loyal today! But the future of the Be OS was in jeapordy when Be Inc. went out of business. Since the Be OS was proprietary, it's users had no upgrade path, nor could they fork it. All seened lost when some loyal Be OS users decided to reimplement all of Be OS back in 2001. They wanted the new Be OS clone to be binary and source code compatible with Be OS 5.0. In this way they could continue using the native Be OS programs unmodified, without a recompile(if the source code was available). The Be OS clone was named OpenBeOS.
OpenBeOS had some trouble though! It used the name "BeOS" which was owned at the time by Palm Inc. The new project was facing a lawsuit if they did not change the name, they did. OpenBeOS was renamed to Haiku in 2004. One may ask why the name Haiku! What is a Haiku? Haiku is a form of Japanese 3 line poetry. The old BeOS used Haiku as their error messages! Sure beats cryptic messages by a long shot!
Haiku did not see a first Alpha release until 2009, followed by Alpha 2 in 2010 and Alpha 3 in June 2011. Now I will show some screenshots of my Haiku install. Please note, the background image was changed from the default which is blue with the Haiku logo.
This image is of the Haiku Desktop.
Next is a image of Web Positive (browser) file manager, About Haiku, and the menu
For some reason the last vertical inch or two of the screen did not get captured!
In case you were wondering, Haiku is licensed under the MIT license. While not copyleft, it is a GPL compatible Free Software license! What makes me drool when I boot Haiku is that it is far from being completed, but even still it is awesome and useable! One of my favorate features of a plethora of cool features in Haiku is the ability to see and change the priority of threads! Apart from the GUI which itself is different, yet familiar; Haiku looks and feels unique, simple, and easy(except for the lack of some features in Alpha 3 release). For more information about Haiku visit the following sites.
www.haiku-os.org
www.haiku-files.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_OS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_OS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Inc
