Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s.... Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from BeOS. (Before that, my computer had a winmodem.)

BeOS was always a very tasteful design. And well documented! I learned so much about low level programming from the Be Newsletters: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html. The BONE article is a great introduction to how a network stack works: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.h.... I still have a copy of Dominic Giampalo’s BeFS book somewhere.

BeOS was very much a product of its time. (Microkernel, use of C++, etc.) What would a modern BeOS look like? My thought: use of a memory and thread safe language like Rust for the main app-level APIs. (Thread safety in BeOS applications, where every window ran in its own thread, was not trivial.) Probably more exokernel than microkernel, with direct access to GPUs and NICs and maybe even storage facilitated by hardware multiplexing. What else?