When most people think of BeOS, they're thinking of BeOS 5. That's the one that Be released for free (basically) at the end of its run in 2000. BeOS 5 was imp

When most people think of BeOS, they're thinking of BeOS 5. That's the one that Be released for free (basically) at the end of its run in 2000. BeOS 5 was impressive but still wasn't ready for prime time and general consumer usage. The versions prior to 4.5 and 5 were pretty rough. In its early days of 95-97, its multimedia capabilities were impressive. If you were like me you were looking at pictures in computer magazines and reading the descriptions of what it could do while your 486 running Windows 3.11 or (slowly) Windows 95 was in the corner, being super inadequate in the face of the MIGHT that was BeOS. But in the year 2000? Not so much. A lot had changed in the five years since the early tech demos and its discontinuation. At the end, Windows (and Linux) had access to 3d accelerators like the Rage 3d and, around the time of BeOS 5, the Radeon and GeForce 256. BeOS video playback and rotating teapot demos that leveraged multithreadedness to eek out performance on slow processors didn't impress because GPUs could do the same thing, better, and faster. All of the organic, baked-in OpenGL goodness in the world doesn't matter if you don't have hardware acceleration. Its networking support also wasn't great and the internet was exploding at the time. The release notes for every version since the earliest betas all noted "improved TCP/IP support" but it never got to the point of being "good". Even today, for enthusiasts playing around with BeOS, one of the first things they install is BONE, the BeOS Networking Environment, which improves (but still doesn't fix!) networking. BONE wasn't available until after the Be ship had sailed. Even that link, written in late 2000 says "BeOS engineers are currently replacing the native net_server with a new network stack largely derived from FreeBSD." That update was never released (some parts were as BONE) and Be was purchased by Palm the following year. For consumers in the year 2000, Windows 98/Me you got IE, Movie Maker, Media Player, separate accounts for kids, 3d card support, DVD playback and a whole bunch of other stuff. None of those features were available out of the box for BeOS. For professionals in the year 2000 who had dual-CPU machines that could take advantage of all of the BeOS goodness, BeOS was utterly inadequate in the face of NT 4/2000 and even linux. It wasn't fully-POSIX compliant, had no multiuser support, and very few professional applications. On top of all that is the same fundamental problem NeXTStep had: poor driver support. You had to be very careful which hardware you selected when attempting to run BeOS.