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Be Liquidation Sale

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lights-that-blink-from-be-on-the-brink dept.

Anonymous Squonk writes: "Be's homepage has a message stating some of the details of their impending dissolution. One little item of note mentioned was 'Public Liquidation Auction January 16 (details to follow)' Who knows what kind of geek goodies might be available at rock bottom prices? Perhaps this could be our last chance to get our hands on a BeBox!" How about some of those nice LED CPU meters?

1 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what's Be? by Uller-RM · · Score: 5, Informative

    BeOS was/is a commercial OS, based on a microkernel, and POSIX-compliant enough that you could compile and run more than a few UNIX console apps on it. It was one of the first OSes to use a journaling filesystem as the default FS, but could read a pretty wide variety of other filesystems, including FAT/NTFS, ext2fs iirc, Mac drives, and a few others. It was marketed as a multimedia-oriented OS, and that was certainly true: it was rock stable, booted fast, had a solid integrated video system and OpenGL support built into the OS, had good filesystem performance and decent network drivers.

    It also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that. (I luckily burnt it on one of my backup CDs a year ago.) The main limitation was that it had one 512MB partition that was created as a file on an existing FAT or NTFS fs, but once it was running, you could copy it over to a spacier install.

    However, there weren't nearly enough drivers, and not enough freeware developer support, so it stayed a niche operating system until the end. Although I know some composers (live AND tracker) that still do their editing work with a Be-based PC on one side and a Mac on the other.