software company based in Menlo Park, CA, founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassee and Steve Sakoman, "to overcome the limitations of existing computer architectures" (Be Press Releases). Producer of BeIA and BeOS.

In October 1995, Be introduced the BeOS to the public the first time, running on the BeBox. Later on, they decided to leave the hardware business and market their operating system for Mac Clones. After Apple backed out of the cloning business in 1997, Be ported their OS to x86, where it's still at.

In early 2000 they performed a focus shift, targeting "internet appliances", aka IPEDs, with their BeIA. Since then, they gave away the Personal Edition of the BeOS for free.

As of December 31, 2001, Jean-Louis Gassee departed from his position as CEO of Be. All intellectual property has been sold to Palm. The domain be.com is for sale.


Before their IPO i was enthusiastic about the openness with which they approached their customers and developers. This has changed a lot though, seemingly because they have to be careful now that each and everybody gets access to any information at the same time. This would mean issuing a press release for even the most minor piece of shit. No wonder they're dead now. Shift happens.
Be Inc.
Be Incorporated, founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Sakoman, is a software company focusing on building new foundations for the next generation of digital content and media design tools. With a team of industry-leading engineers and business executives in the United States, Europe, and Japan, the company is dedicated to removing the limitations of existing computer architectures and delivering a new level of price performance on both personal computers and Internet appliances.

In October 1995, Be introduced BeOS at Agenda 96. The demo was done on multiprocessor hardware Be had specially developed, the BeBox. The first public developer release, BeOS for the BeBox, was distributed in April 1996. August 1996 brought the first demonstrations of BeOS for Power Macintosh hardware, and in January 1997 Be discontinued the BeBox to concentrate solely on BeOS.

On July 14th 1997 Be shipped the first public, commercial release of BeOS for PowerPC, BeOS Preview Release. Preview Release 2 shipped later that year, in October 1997.

In March 1998, BeOS crossed the processor chasm, with the shipment of BeOS Release 3, the first version of BeOS for Intel Architecture processors, and Be's first cross-platform software release. Later that year, in November 1998, Be introduced BeOS Release 4, the latest major release of the product, featuring the new high-performance Media Kit among many other new features.

Be Incorporated is based in Menlo Park, California and has European headquarters in Paris. Be currently has over 100 employees worldwide.

http://www.be.com
To correct hackthemainframe's writeup, the latest major version is R5 and was released in March 2000. Updates have brought it to 5.0.3. There is a Personal Edition available which can boot from an image file on a fat32 or ext2 partition, or can be installed to its own partition after booting.

http://free.be.com

There'll be hardware OpenGL and decent networking and the Java 2 VM soon. When it's done... really... sure... yeah.

Edit, June 10, 2002: Well, that didn't work out too well, Be's been dead since January and the entire be.com domain is gone, and for sale for several hundred thousand dollars. BeOS 5 Personal Edition is still available from mirrors, listed on www.bebits.com.

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