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Comment by vt240 | Hacker News Reader

Off topic question. I used BeOS for years and it was the platform I learned C++ on. I just checked out the Wikipedia page and it was pretty unclear on what ever happened. Anyone know where the OS ended up, seems like such a loss.

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It ended up as Haiku: https://www.haiku-os.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)

It's linked from the wikipedia BeOS page but not prominently...

Yea, I saw that on there. But it appeared from the page they were doing a total rewrite. Anyway, those were weird days with all those PREP boxes, scattershot OS development from Apple. Booting up into BeOS for the first time and the whole development experience was like a gift from god. Anyway, thanks for the link.

Haiku does not contain any code from BeOS, except the filemanager and launcher, which were open souced by Be before they folded. It is a complete rewrite, done by volunteers.

I have the open source knock-off Haiku running in VirtualBox, but that's probably not your question. BeOS proper was sold to Access:

In September 2005, ACCESS acquired PalmSource, the owner of the Palm OS and BeOS. The company has used these assets and expertise to create the Access Linux Platform, an open-source Linux-based platform for smartphones and other mobile devices [Wikipedia]

I remember my jaw dropping seeing their demo of graphical multitasking on a PC that couldn't do a fraction of that under Windows. Came in part due to architectural choices. Here's some of them for those trying to learn from BeOS:

https://users.cs.jmu.edu/abzugcx/public/Student-Produced-Ter...

same here. A lot of BeOS lives on in android. Romain Guy was a huge contributor to the kernel (file system, I think) and I notice his name float by in the photo creds for my chromecast. Dianne Hackborn also works for Android, when I first coded in dalvik Java there were definitely concepts that floated in from BeOS inter-process communication.

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