BeOS
Be, Inc. BeOS.Be, Inc. sold its intellectual property assets to Palm, Inc. in late 2001 and then it is dissolving.
Haiku (OpenBeOS) project is trying to rewrite and then extend BeOS. The kernel is based on one created by Travis Geiselbrecht called NewOS.
See also BeBits, a repository of BeOS software and beunited.org for the Open Standards BeOS-compatible Operating System (OSBOS) specification.
Travis Geiselbrecht used to be a Be kernel engineer; he wrote NewOS after he got laid off. IMO, BeOS was one of the best systems ever ,in that it boots in +/- 15 seconds (faster than anything I've seen except maybe CP/M-86 ;-). Also, again IMO, it's truly crash-proof-I've never had any problems with stability. I recommend getting the current BeOS 5 PE Max distro from www.bebits.com. The Max distro's are free CD images, so go ahead and look for them. As of this writing (02/07/03), the current version is Max 2.1, and it's a 223MB .zip file (includes Nero cue files and patches to make it work right on Pentium 4 and Athlon XP systems).