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I had a PowerPC Mac in ~1998 and I put BeOS R4.5 on it. What a HUGE change from MacOS ... I couldn't believe a computer could actually act and respond like that! I jumped ship to Intel hardware to stick with BeOS.

I'm very curious what you worked on at Be - the development team wasn't that large, was it?

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The development team was very small. I worked on audio mixing code, capturing video encoded from Bt848 cards, audio and video codecs, anything related to audio and video timing. Several great programmers were there and continue to do amazing things at other companies big and small. I ended up working with many of them at Apple. At some point, it seems many had to choose between Google or Apple.

Very neat. I bought a cheap Bt848 card in '99. I used my BeOS machine to watch TV in my first college dorm. Thanks for all of the memories!

The first version of the driver was written by Be's VP of Engineering, Steve Sakoman. Steve started the "Big Newton" project at Apple and his experience with the AT&T processor was the reason the first BeBox prototypes used AT&T Hobbit CPUs.

Steve returned to Apple as VP of CoreOS or something like that. I was super happy when he came back. I think he is living in the rain forests of Hawaii now, clad only in palm leaves.

Thank you for your service

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