[UFO Chicago] Haiku (was: Re: Tech Support)

[Larry Garfield]

On Thursday, October 21, 2010 10:47:25 pm Brian Sobolak wrote:
> On Wed, October 20, 2010 10:20 pm, Matthew T. Gibbs wrote:
> > ----- Original Message ----
> > 
> >> From: Jay F Shachter <jay at m5.chicago.il.us>
> >> To: Michael Sphar <mikesphar at gmail.com>
> >> Cc: ufo at ufo.chicago.il.us
> >> Sent: Wed, October 20, 2010 7:33:31 PM
> >> Subject: Re: [UFO Chicago] Haiku (was: Re: Tech Support)
> >> However, the Haiku that  is referred to in http://xkcd.com/806 is a
> >> computer operating system.  Many thanks to  Michael Sphar for referring
> >> 
> >> us to the website:
> >> > I this  case, I believe it's referring to  http://www.haiku-os.org/
> >> 
> >> I had never  heard of this operating system before, and I am
> >> intrigued.  We now have  one more operating system to talk about at our
> >> UFO meetings, instead of just  talking about Linux all the time.  Does
> >> anyone on our mailing list have  actual experience with Haiku?  If not,
> >> does anyone want to volunteer to  try it out?
> > 
> > I downloaded the VMware image and ran it for a few minutes.  Seems to be
> > quite
> > fast; however, I didn't have time to look into it further.  It is
> > supposed to be
> > an open-source re-write of BeOS.
> 
> BeOS was bitchin' and a lot of fun to play with back in the day.  It's of
> interest for those who are interested in OS design, I think, but it was
> folded into Palm (or Apple?) and quickly disappeared.

Be, Inc. was bought by PalmSource, Inc, the software half spin-off from Palm, 
Inc.  PalmSource didn't care about the OS, but wanted the engineers.  They 
bought the company for a song (it was mostly dead by that point anyway), 
ignored BeOS, gave a few major Be owners/investors key positions with 
PalmSource, and had the Be cum PalmSource engineers work on the next 
generation Palm OS version 6, later renamed to Palm OS Cobalt.  

Cobalt shipped on exactly zero devices and was quickly forgotten.  Why no one 
was interested in it is the subject of much debate, but it was essentially 
still born.  Parallels to Apple Copeland abound.  

PalmSource then bought China Mobile Soft, which had a Linux-based phone OS, 
and announced that they would be developing a new Linux-based OS with a 
proprietary GUI layer on top, much in the vein of Mac OS X.  How much of the 
Cobalt work ended up in that is not clear, but before it was finished 
PalmSource was bought by ACCESS Systems, who eventually finished the project 
and named it Access Linux Platform (ALP), which I don't believe ever shipped 
either.  (There may be some bit player Asian-only manufacturer using it, but 
no one of consequence.  I don't recall exactly.)

Palm, Inc, meanwhile, after renaming itself to palmOne and then back to Palm 
just to confuse people and make investors think they were doing something, 
said "Screw you guys, you're even more incompetent than we are" and went off 
to develop their own proprietary-GUI-on-Linux mobile OS from scratch, which 
was eventually released as webOS.  webOS was promptly run over in the market 
by  Android, Google's custom-GUI-on-Linux mobile platform.

Somewhere in California there was rumored to be a one room office with "Be, 
Inc." on the door that consisted of one guy napping, because Be wasn't 
technically dissolved for years so had to have an employee of some kind to 
answer junk mail.  I do not know if there is any truth to this story.

(Thank you for the trip down memory lane!)

--Larry Garfield