I still remember this time quite vividly. Apple had fired Jobs years earlier and knew that MacOS was not a modern enough operating system to make them competitive. BeOS and NeXT were competing for Apple's partnership to make the next Mac operating system.

At the time I had an Intel pII Xeon desktop from Dell that had a nvidia monster video card and turtle beach sound card. Oddly enough, the processor, video card, and sound card were all compatible with BeOS so I had an unofficia x86 BeBox. The official BeBox was a PPC box.

BeOS was chosen to be the successor to MacOS 9 until the 11th hour, when a meeting with Jobs and the board of Apple met. BeOS was dumped almost immediately for NeXT that night.

BeOS was a completely new operating system while NeXT was based on a Mach OS BSD base (later to become Darwin BSD).

Be Inc fell apart and sold to 3Com, which sold to HP eventually and there it was neglected and mothballed. Haiku came out later to try and bring the project back, but at the time of Haiku's release Be was already over a decade old and the code had not kept up.

There was so much momentum in the BeOS world before the 3com acquisition that was stifled and killed.

Now this period of time is often referred to as "When NeXT bought Apple with Apple's money."