10 Year BeOS Anniversary
Judging by Scot Hacker’s post about it as well as Eugenia’s wonderful article on osnews.com, BeOS would be 10 years this time arround. Oh boy, that was a time. I started out with PCs when I got my first Windows 95 Box in a student home with 10mbit/s laser-based connection to the university backbone and hence the internet. I hated computers before that time but ended up administering the network, a really old and amazing (you could fold out the harddisks and surf behind the fans! ;)) sun workstation running solaris and mail, apache, the works. I still remember trying to install Windows for Workgroups on a really old PC with something like 8MB of RAM. Oh boy, the joy. Surfing the net, I soon found Be Leading Edge, one of the first if not the first news site about BeOS out there. I had to join up and still call some of the people behind it my friends. It enriched increadibly.
With a short stop at BeView, which was disbanded again soon, I moved on to join Adrian Ziemkowski and some others at BeNews. This started the time of what I think was the biggest and best online news site about BeOS out there. Sorry for those that feel offended. We had a great team and produced some very nice work. I still remember meeting Adrian and Scot at Comdex to report about BeOS. I remember Leo Laporte asking whether I wanted to report about BeOS for Tech TV but I seem to have put too much emphasis in my reply that reporting for BeNews would be my focus… bad move … I never heard from him since ;) We had some great dinners with Be staff though which I still remember fondly. Oh the old times.
But back to BeOS. I was hocked. This was the best OS out there. It had its shortcomings, obviously, but other than that it was amazing. I remember buying a dual cpu machine just so I could see the full power of the OS. I remember playing MP3s backwards with ease. These were the times. We thought we had the world cornered, they would just have to see the light. We stopped thinking that, finally, when Palm bought Be’s property. We at BeNews thought long and hard, but in the end it was the right time to call it quits. It was hard, to say the least, deciding on your own that lots of your past time has gone down the drain, felt wasted, but it was something we had to do. We had to pulll the plug. We did. Thank you.
I even bought Be shares, as my first shares ever bought, ex some IBM ones which I still own today. I saw them ride way up on RedHat takeover rumors and didn’t sell, out of stupidity I’d say now. But hey, those were the hype days. Today I got a mail from Citibank. It includes a transaction on my account. I just got all my Be shares sold for 0,58 USD and there go my last Be shares. Sad, but true. After 10 years, the journey is finally over.
I bow down before all the people that were part of this. Thank you for the ride. I learned more in this than I could have in other places at that time and place.
I also found back some old articles on BeOS and other things that might be interesting for some of you. I converted them to PDF once upon a time. So check out the history of BeOS, Samba and the World of Networking and the T-RackS review. Take care everyone. On to new challenges.