I first read about Be, Inc. the BeBox and the BeOS some time around 1996. This was the old, DR8 days of BeOS. I remember being captivated by an entirely new system, which was exactly what I thought the world needed at the time. Windows 95 was out, Mac OS was lagging, and BeOS was a fresh, new approach. The ideas they were making reality made reading about BeOS remind me of how I felt when I first started reading BASIC books in elementary school.

I was a closet Be fan for years afterwards. The family computer was a Macintosh Classic manufactured in 1991 while the rest of the world was getting Pentium and PowerPC class systems. It was a bit of dog, but it’s also a real trooper. The old Mac still smiles when you power it on, and still runs every bit as well as it did the day we pulled it out of the box. It wasn’t until late 1999 that I had a computer that could run BeOS. Yes, it was an x86.

After taking over a week (off and on) to download R5 Personal Edition over a 33.6 modem, I went out to Best Buy and dropped the $80 for the R5 Pro / BeOS Bible bundle. To this day, I still consider that bar-none the best $80 I’ve ever spent. Period.

How do you put a price on something that alters your world view, furthers your education, satisfies your craving to create and explore, brings you in contact with some truly remarkable folks, and works exactly how you’d expect it too? I’d say it should be priceless. Thankfully, Best Buy didn’t.

Most of my development at home these days focuses on BeOS. Sometimes I wonder why I bother with an OS that’s been ‘dead’ for the last four years. Then I look at what Linux and FreeBSD have done, what Haiku is doing, and remind myself. It’s not dead, it’s not going to just go away, and there’s a lot more people like myself out there who enjoy challenges, building new and useful things, and pushing themselves to learn more. Luckily, there’s quite a few of us who happened to like BeOS, and we’ve kept it going. Haiku is a potential new beginning. A new jump-off point to pickup where the engineers I admired so much at Be, Inc. left off. Since I have no social life, why not help?

So here’s what I’ve done so far that I’m willing to publicly admit to. I hope you can find some of this useful.