Be Inc. was an American computer company founded in 1990. It is best known for the development and release of

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...

, and the

BeBox The BeBox is a dual CPU personal computer, briefly sold by Be Inc. to run the company's own operating system, BeOS. It has PowerPC CPUs, its I/O board has a custom "GeekPort", and the front bezel has "Blinkenlights". The BeBox made its debut ...

personal computer. Be was founded by former

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

executive

Jean-Louis Gassée Jean-Louis Gassée (born March 1944 in Paris, France) is a business executive. He is best known as a former executive at Apple Computer, where he worked from 1981 to 1990. He also founded Be Inc., creators of the BeOS computer operating system. A ...

with capital from Seymour Cray. Be's corporate offices were located in Menlo Park, California, with regional sales offices in France and

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. The company later relocated to Mountain View, California for the duration of its dissolution. The company's main intent was to develop a new operating system using the C++ programming language on a proprietary hardware platform. BeOS was initially exclusive to the BeBox, and was later ported to

Power Mac The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by ''MacWorld'' as "the most important te ...

s despite resistance from Apple, due to the hardware specifications assistance of

Power Computing Power Computing Corporation (often referred to as Power Computing) was the first company selected by Apple Inc to create Macintosh-compatible computers (" Mac clones"). Stephen “Steve” Kahng, a computer engineer best known for his design of t ...

. In 1998, BeOS was ported to the Intel x86 architecture, and PowerPC support was reduced and finally dropped after

BeOS R5 BeOS R5 is the final version of BeOS from Be Inc. It was released in March 2000, and came in two varieties: Professional and Personal. R5 was the 4th major release of BeOS for a public audience, and the 6th since it left developer-only stages. ...

. It inspired the open source operating system, Haiku.

History

Be was founded by former

executive

in 1990 with Steve Sakoman after being ousted by Apple CEO John Sculley. Soon joined also

Erich Ringewald The given name Eric, Erich, Erikk, Erik, Erick, or Eirik is derived from the Old Norse name ''Eiríkr'' (or ''Eríkr'' in Old East Norse due to monophthongization). The first element, ''ei-'' may be derived from the older Proto-Norse ''* ain ...

, lead engineer in Apple 'Pink' OS team, as CTO. According to several sources including ''

Macworld UK ''Macworld'' is a website dedicated to products and software of Apple Inc., published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG Inc. It started life as a print magazine in 1984 and had the largest audited circulation (both total and newsstand) of Macint ...

'', the company name "Be" originated in a conversation between Gassée and Sakoman. Gassée originally thought the company should be called "United Technoids Inc.", but Sakoman disagreed and said he would start looking through the dictionary for a better name. A few days later, when Gassée asked if he had made any progress, Sakoman replied that he had got tired and stopped at "B." Gassée said, " 'Be' is nice. End of story." Be aimed to create a modern computer operating system written in C++ on a proprietary hardware platform. In 1995, the

personal computer was released by Be, with its distinctive strips of lights along the front that indicate the activity of each PowerPC

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

, and the combined analogue/digital, 37-pin

GeekPort The BeBox is a dual CPU personal computer, briefly sold by Be Inc. to run the company's own operating system, BeOS. It has PowerPC CPUs, its I/O board has a custom "GeekPort", and the front bezel has "Blinkenlights". The BeBox made its debu ...

. In addition to BeOS and BeBox, Be also produced

BeIA BeIA, or BeOS for Internet Appliances, was a minimized version of Be Inc.'s BeOS operating system for embedded systems. The BeIA system presents a browser-based interface to the user. The browser was based on the Opera 4.0 code base, but most ...

, an OS for internet appliances. Its commercial deployments included the Sony eVilla and

DT Research DT may refer to: Arts Music * Dt. (band), a Japanese dance/rock group * "D.T.", an instrumental song on ''Who Made Who'', AC/DC's 1986 album * Dark Tranquillity, Swedish melodic death metal band * Dream Theater, American progressive metal band * ...

, during its short lifespan. In 1996, Apple was searching for a new operating system to replace the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

. Eventually, the two final options were

and NeXTSTEP. NeXT was chosen and acquired due to the persuasive influence of

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a ...

and the incomplete state of the BeOS product, criticized at the time for lacking such features as printing capability. It was rumoured that the deal fell apart because of money, with Be Inc allegedly wanting US$500M and a high-level post in the company, when the NeXT deal closed at US$400M. The rumours were dismissed by Gassée.

Dissolution and litigation

Ultimately the assets of the Be, Inc. were bought for

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

11 million in 2001 by Palm, Inc., where Gassée served on the board of directors, at which point the company entered dissolution. The company then initiated

litigation - A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil actio ...

against Microsoft for aggressively anti-competitive and monopolistic business practices. Joining a long history of antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft, Be specifically contested Microsoft's prohibition of OEMs to allow dual-boot systems containing both Microsoft and non-Microsoft operating systems. The suit was settled in September 2003 with a US$23.25 million payout to Be, Inc. Palm subsequently spun off a wholly owned subsidiary

PalmSource ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc. (formerly PalmSource) is a subsidiary of ACCESS which develops the Palm OS PDA operating system and its successor, the Access Linux Platform, as well as BeOS. PalmSource was spun off from Palm Computing, Inc. P ...

to develop its Palm OS and related software, with the Be assets being transferred to PalmSource which was subsequently acquired by Japanese-based ACCESS.

Legacy

The

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

operating system Haiku resumed BeOS's legacy in the form of a complete reimplementation. Beta 1 of Haiku was released in September 2018. As of then, there is an active development team with nightly releases.

References

{{BeOS 1990 establishments in California 2001 disestablishments in California Companies based in Menlo Park, California Computer companies established in 1990 Computer companies disestablished in 2001 Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct software companies of the United States Home computer hardware companies Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area