Plan Be (1997)

Mac Folklore Radio

Original text by Henry Bortman and Jeff Pittelkau, MacUser, January 1997.

How does BeOS measure up to System 7.5, and could it have become the next-generation Mac OS? The authors examine why Copland would not have been the crashproof operating system we had all hoped for.

Official BeOS demo video from … I’ll have to guess 1998, the year the x86 port of BeOS shipped. An extremely rudimentary port of Cinema 4D is shown. Maxon appears to have dropped all plans to complete their BeOS port of Cinema 4D after Be decided to focus on the Internet appliance market in late 1999.

BeOS demo video intro music: Virtual (void) Remix from the Cotton Squares, a.k.a. Be Engineering. BeOS, it’s The OS. More on the Cotton Squares. Standing In The Death Car!

AFAIK a pure software multitrack digital audio recording and editing suite never shipped for the BeOS. Otari’s RADAR doesn’t count since that was a hardware/software bundle, and an expensive one at that. Second version. If you can find a DAW for BeOS that was available in 2000 right before everything imploded, I’d like to hear from you. :-) I have a sample track from one but I don’t think it was ever published. GrooveMachine doesn’t count since it’s geared towards short samples and phrases. BeBits lists Qua as a hard disk recorder, but the author’s website states its audio functionality is also centered on short samples.

Printing support was not a priority for BeOS. Hey, this was supposed to be an OS for the multimedia future, not dead tree prepress! I tried the third-party BInkjet printer support package with a DeskJet 680C and it worked well.

Nitin Ganatra of iOS Contacts and Mail.app fame worked in Apple Developer Technical Support through the 1990s. He talked about working with developers and the perils of letting Apple marketing loose on Copland in the Debug podcast, episode 39.

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The Cotton Squares/BeOS Demo Video: Where Are They Now?

Baron Arnold: Danger (early 2000s, now: ???)

Frank Boosman: AWS

Jeff Bush: ???

Jean-Louis Gassée: The Monday Note, Grateful Geek

Ficus Kirkpatrick: Google, Meta

Scott Paterson: making the world a better place

Doug Wright: ???