I should have been more specific. At the time, yes, it looked like the future and it was a big bonus that it ran on Power Macs, too. But I think that the x86 pi

I should have been more specific. At the time, yes, it looked like the future and it was a big bonus that it ran on Power Macs, too. But I think that the x86 pivot, while I agree the hardware diversity was a huge barrier (and Neil Stephenson even agrees in In The Beginning Was The Command Line: "But Microsoft owns the high ground at the moment, because it doesn't have to write its own drivers"), didn't save them mostly because Be the OS and Be the company were just too much of an unknown quantity. I think that's what Stephenson was getting at when he said, "What holds Be back in this country is that the smart people are afraid to look like suckers." Nowadays, though, and no offense to the OP, no one remembers where BeOS got its legs. And this has translated into what's been preserved. You can find some Intel BeOS stuff in some corners but almost no PowerPC.