Waxing Nostalgic

As should be obvious from the comments I've made, I read Slashdot religiously. I don't agree with all (or even a lot) of the editorialising that goes on in the articles, but it does give you a quick overview of what's going on in the computer industry.

Anyways, getting on topic here: Got in at 'work' this morning and dropped off the ethics application (which due to complications hadn't made it in last week) and then took a quick glance at Slashdot before settling down to figure out where I had left off almost two weeks ago.

Getting back to work quickly wasn't to be.

There before my eyes was a story with the Be logo. This was not a Be logo with a black mourning band in the top corner. No, this was a Be logo that was unmarred by such blemishes. This was a Be logo that accompanied the news that yellowTAB was announcing that new machines were going to ship with Zeta, their next-gen implementation of BeOS, pre-installed.

My heart soared, I could hear choirs of angels singing hallelujahs in the background. Oh wait, Europe only. Ah well, I couldn't afford a new computer anyways.

Either way, the article awakened in me a yearning, a burning desire, a longing to reinstall BeOS once again. That too was not to be, mainly due to a lack of hard drives and a decent CPU to run it on. Despite that, I still want to install BeOS. I used it for the better part of a year, only swapping back to Windows/Linux/BSD/whatever-my-OS-du-jour-was to do some Java coding from time to time.

I used it and I loved it.

Out of all the OSes I've installed (and trust me, that's a lot) BeOS was my favourite. It was small, fast, stable in the days when a PII was still top of the line. The GUI was clean (although it hasn't aged well), it was easy to use, and it scaled remarkably well. If the apps I had needed had still been available and the hardware support still there I probably would still be using it. That and a decent web browser, because, let's face it, NetPositive was barely HTML 3.x compliant.

Sure there were problems: No multi-user support, updates that occasionally broke drivers (5.0.3 broke support for my Epson printer), and a company whose eventual fate was to have their assests sold of to a PDA maker. But despite its faults I still loved it.

Granted, Zeta isn't likely to do much save sate the faithful (and even then some items, like the removing of the sliding tabs, may anger them). The app support is still sub-par despite a nice selection of stuff over on BeBits, and there's still no Java. But hey, at the very it comes with Firebird pre-installed.

Christ, it sounds like I was talking about an ex-girlfriend or something. Further proof that I've spent too much time attatched to a keyboard.