Never send a desktop OS to do a handheld OS's job: Palm to buy Be, who could have been the next Amiga, had it not been for Microsoft, and Linux, and MacOS X, and everybody else with an OS with actual applications stealing their reason to exist.

I've still got a few BeOS CDs somewhere, including a few Intel ones which are rather picky about graphics cards (in most cases you get slow, minging, 800x600x16 shades of grey) and (needless to say) don't run under VMware, and (I think) a PowerPC one that only runs on really old Power Macs. (I once ran it on a Umax Mac clone I had at Monash, which puts it in historical context.) It had a UNIX shell, and you could compile text-based GNU apps, but because of its revolutionary design, it wasn't anything like any OS in popular use, and hence had only a handful of uninspiring shareware apps. All in all, nice swing, no follow-through.

Now the question is whether Palm will attempt to shoehorn BeOS onto their palmtops; if they do, it could be awkward (witness Microsoft's ill-fated forays into PDAs. OTOH, PalmOS could get rather cramped and unscalable, much like the old MacOS (which it resembles to an extent).

Want to say something? Do so here.

Note to spammers: This comment system applies the rel=nofollow attribute to the poster's URL and all links. Posting links to this page will not improve their search engine rankings.

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot, please enter the text in the image on the right in the field below it.

Your Comment:

Remember my details.

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.