Arc Technica has a write up the recently released alpha of Haiku, an open source operating system based on the now defunct BeOS. Looking at the screen shots of the Haiku UI brought back some memories. I remember sitting in my cube at a Macintosh clone manufacturer I worked for (remember Mac clones?) messing around with one of the early releases of the BeOS. It had a slick interface with candy colored icons. Everything about it was fast, it booted fast, launched applications fast (what few apps that were available), dragging and dropping seemed faster even though it probably wasn’t. And to a Mac user in the late 90’s, it showed the potential of what the PowerPC chip could do, potential the MacOS itself would not leverage for years.
Many people, myself included, thought that Apple was going to buy Be and that the BeOS was the future of the MacOS. Instead Apple bought NeXT (and bought Steve Jobs), in the long run an obviously better move. Be struggled for a few years, was bought by Palm and then faded into obscurity.
I think it’s great that Haiku exists, but I have to wonder with the increasing popularity of Linux (and the various distributions there of) and Google’s introduction of the Chrome OS, not mention the already established Windows and OS X, if there is even a place in the market for for a rehash of the BeOS. Even positioning it as a netbook OS is stretch, the line between netbooks and notebooks is already blurring and netbooks haven’t been around that long. Pretty soon even a netbook will be able to run a full on version of Windows without much of a lag. But who knows, maybe netbooks will get cheaper instead of faster and someday that $50 netbook you see at Target will run Haiku.