Be

Be, Inc. was an American computer company founded in 1990. It is best known for the development and release of BeOS, and the BeBox personal computer. Be was founded by former Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassée with capital from.

Be's corporate offices were located in Menlo Park, California, with regional sales offices in France and Japan. The company later relocated to, California for the duration of its dissolution.

The company's main intent was to develop a new operating system using the programming language on a proprietary hardware platform. BeOS was initially exclusive to the BeBox, and was later ported to Apple Computer's Power Macs despite resistance from Apple, due to the hardware specifications assistance of Power Computing. In 1998, BeOS was ported to the Intel x86 architecture, and PowerPC support was reduced and finally dropped after. It inspired the open source operating system,.

History
Be was founded by former Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassée in 1990 with Steve Sakoman after being ousted by Apple CEO John Sculley.

According to several sources including Macworld UK, the company name "Be" originated in a conversation between Gassée and Sakoman. Gassée originally thought the company should be called "United Technoids Inc.", but Sakoman disagreed and said he would start looking through the dictionary for a better name. A few days later, when Gassée asked if he had made any progress, Sakoman replied that he had got tired and stopped at "B." Gassée said, "Be is nice. End of story."

Be aimed to create a modern computer operating system written in on a proprietary hardware platform. In 1995, the BeBox personal computer was released by Be, with its distinctive strips of lights along the front that indicate the activity of each PowerPC CPU, and the combined analogue/digital, 37-pin. In addition to BeOS and BeBox, Be also produced BeIA, an OS for s. Its commercial deployments included the and, during its short lifespan.

In 1996, Apple was searching for a new operating system to replace its classic Mac OS. Eventually, the two final options were BeOS and NeXTSTEP. NeXT was chosen and acquired due to the persuasive influence of Steve Jobs and the incomplete state of the BeOS product, which was criticized for lacking features such as printing capability at the time. NeXTSTEP became Rhapsody and eventually developed into Mac OS X.

Dissolution and litigation
Ultimately the assets of the Be, Inc. were bought for 11 million in November 2001 by, where Gassée served on the board of directors, at which point the former company began the process of. Be then initiated against Microsoft for aggressively  and monopolistic business practices. Joining a long history of, Be specifically contested Microsoft's prohibition of s to allow dual-boot systems containing both Microsoft and non-Microsoft operating systems. The suit was settled in September 2003 with a US$23.25 million payout to Be, Inc.

Palm subsequently spun off a wholly owned subsidiary to develop its Palm OS and related software, with the Be assets being transferred to PalmSource which was subsequently acquired by Japanese-based.

Legacy
The open source operating system resumed BeOS's legacy in the form of a complete reimplementation. Beta 1 of Haiku was released in September 2018. As of then, there is an active development team with.

Articles

 * Be Inc. is not to be by Linda Rosencrance at Computerworld (2002-03-04)