<story><title>BeOS Demo Video (1998) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>furyg3</author><text>I was lucky enough to have a friend working at BeOS at the very end.  This is when they abandoned all hope of getting bought by Apple (erm... I mean gaining presence on the desktop) and focused on &amp;quot;Internet Appliances&amp;quot; like eVilla.&lt;p&gt;BeOS was really amazing at the time, especially in comparison to &amp;#x27;next generation OSes&amp;#x27; like Windows NT, the vaporware that was Copland, Linux (which was unusable for mortals) or Solaris.  It was clear to me that the future was going to look like BeOS or NeXT, but I could actually easily download and run BeOS on my mac.  It was incredibly useable... I installed it and was able to use it for months.  It just needed apps.&lt;p&gt;When Apple went with Jobs (and thus NeXT) I thought that made sense.  But when I saw the early releases of Rhapsody I really thought they had made a huge mistake.  BeOS was just so much better.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s really fun to fantasize about what the world would have been like if BeOS made it big.  There&amp;#x27;s still a lot of tech there that has not yet made it into desktop OSes.</text></comment>
<story><title>BeOS Demo Video (1998) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carlesfe</author><text>I remember installing BeOS a long time ago, when I was fiddling with old linux distros which were almost impossible to install (what is the model of your RAMDAC? which is your interrupt controller? manually configure your modem!)&lt;p&gt;I was absolutely amazed at the ease of install, running the software and the powerful GUI. I even ran it for some months as my only OS, since it had a web browser and e-mail client and the dialup config was very straightforward.&lt;p&gt;After that time, I started missing a lot of software, especially browser updates, so I tried linux again and found that it had improved a bit, so I stuck with it.&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;ll never forget how probably the best OS at that time failed into misery for the lack of software and a bit of promotion.</text></comment>