[MisterTea]

Spent many hours on BeOS and visited their booth at PCexpo in NYC around 1999. The big draw was the multimedia centric OS where the GUI always remained responsive. It also did things like allow you to open up a dozen AVI files on a single core sub 1GHz Pentium 2/3 and not have the computer grind to a halt. Instead the videos skipped frames and you continue to work on other programs. It was a pleasant experience compared to the rough shape of early Linux/BSD and the obtuse horror show that was Windows 95/98. We even had a somewhat working port of Netscape and there was some momentum building behind it. But then came Windows 2000 and Be sorta lost steam on the desktop and then went in some bizarre internet appliance direction and it was over shortly after.

Don't quote me on this but the another powerful feature was the decoupling of media codecs from programs. Adding support for a new media codec was as simple as dropping a .so lib file into a /lib/codec directory and all your media programs now supported that codec. This applied to all media including audio, video and images. This was all part of the BeOS API.

It also had a decent c++ API and multithreading was a first class concept in the system allowing one to easily write programs to take advantage of multiple processors. That allowed the machine to easily scale as you added more processors, something Windows 98 couldn't do at the time. This was well before the concept of multi-core. Back then you needed more sockets to add more processors and it wasn't cheap.