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user-inactivated  ·  4049 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2

    Me? I'm still bummed BeOS never caught on. That shit was slick.

    Yesterday it worked


    Today it is not working


    The web is like that.

BeOS was beautiful, but it was too late to be able to just toss an OS out there and have it catch on. There were no applications, and not much reason to write them. If they'd had some good graphics applications they might have been able to win over the TV people who still missed Amiga, or maybe the movie people fleeing SGI, but they didn't. The free unixes were better nerd toys, and BeOS wasn't suited for the server-side applications where the money was. There were no games for it, and making the kind of games that would draw people had already gotten too expensive for someone to do as a hobby. Plenty of people bought copies, and I've never heard anyone who didn't remember it being really cool, but no one found a use for it.

That said, Hiaku is there if you want it. It's still pretty cool, and still not much good for anything but being pretty cool.