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The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World

(And Maybe It Was Right) A nostalgic dive into the Hacker News thread that in 2015 reminded us how beautiful we were when we dreamed in multithreading Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away called “the ’90s,” we still believed that the future of computing would be decided based on pure technical merit. What naivety! It was an era when an operating system could make you fall in love at first boot, when opening four videos simultaneously without hiccups seemed more magical than pulling a rabbit from a hat.

In 2015, while everyone was discussing the Apple Watch and the Ellen Pao controversy on Reddit, someone on Hacker News had the brilliant (or cruel) idea of posting a BeOS demo video from 1998. Microsoft and its OEM practices that prevented BeOS from being pre-installed, the lack of applications (“ It just needed apps ” – the saddest refrain in computing history), the wrong timing. There were Be Inc veterans telling stories from the inside (“ Many of the people from Be ended up at Android “), there were Haiku OS developers keeping the flame alive, there were youngsters discovering this lost world for the first time.

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