Microsoft, Competitor Reach Settlement: Here’s the last gasp of a dying man — Be is a dead company, having sold about everything to Palm last year.
“Microsoft Corp. agreed Friday to pay $23.3 million to Be Inc. to settle an antitrust lawsuit that claimed the software giant negotiated deals with computer makers that cut out the smaller company’s competing operating system.”
I’ve heard that BeOS was a very good operating system, which is too bad. Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon and In the Beginning Was The Command Line was a big Be fan.
There are still Be sites that are going strong, although the www.be.com domain name is currently for sale.
Neal Stephenson is a hacker-novelist responsible for some of the most popular fiction among computer geeks. Recently, he wrote Cryptonomicon, which was hailed far outside geek circles as a great piece of fiction. In 1999, Stephenson wrote an essay (a 38,000-word essay...) called "In the Beginning was the Command Line."…
I actually installed BeOS a couple of different times, just to play with it. IMHO they probably did the second best job of making a unix/linux operating system user-friendly that I've seen (Mac OS X being the best)
Of course at the time there were no apps to run, so I'd spend about 15 minutes thinking "Gee, this is really cool." Then I'd boot back into a mainstream OS and go back to work.
