#9 BeOS

Year created: 1991

Company: Be Inc.

BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was built for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS.

The BeOS GUI was developed on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design. It was positioned as a multimedia platform which could be used by a substantial population of desktop users and a competitor to Mac OS and Microsoft Windows.

Apple offered to buy Be Inc. for $125 million in 1995, but CEO Jean-Louis Gassée wanted $200 million. Instead it bought Steve Jobs's NeXT, and Palm acquired the company's assets for $11 million in 2001.

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