BeOS was great, but compare Steve Jobs' NeXT presentation (1992) to the BeOS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

BeOS was great, but compare Steve Jobs' NeXT presentation (1992) to the BeOS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk NeXTSTEP is the predecessor of OS X, the rest is history. BeOS filesystem "BeFS" had extended attributes (metadata) with indexing and querying features similar to a relational database and Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips". Though Microsoft failed to complete Cairo-OS as well as WinFS. The BeFS main developer wrote a book about it, as it is out of print now he released it as PDF for free: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System Check out HaikuOS, an open source BeOS reimplementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) . And there were two BeOS inspired OS: ZETA-OS and SkyOS with some shady history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS Some of the BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP history is documented in Apple Copland OS article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Cancellation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Canc... Another interesting video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg (In 1991 Steve Jobs' company commissioned an head-to-head programming competition to show how much faster and easier it was to program a NeXT computer vs a Sun workstation. The NeXT operating system went on to be the foundation for Apple's Macintosh OS-X about a decade later.)