BeOS

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What Does BeOS Mean?

BeOS is an operating system for personal computers designed by Be Inc. First developed to run on BeBox hardware, BeOS was developed for digital media applications and development. Seen as a competitor to Classic Mac OS and Microsoft Windows, it was not able to achieve a significant market share, ultimately making it commercially unviable. The parent company, Be Inc., was later acquired by Palm Inc. Currently BeOS is used and maintained by a small group of technology enthusiasts.

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Techopedia Explains BeOS

The default encoding in the BeOS GUI is Unicode. BeOS was developed in order to have an operating system that made use of new architectural thoughts and was free from the clutter of older operating systems. BeOS was used as an alternative operating system for multimedia applications or applications needing faster handling of video, games or other similar uses. BeOS is capable of executing on multiple microprocessors simultaneously and collaborating with work threads across multiple processors. The file system of BeOS is 64-bit, capable of handling large files in the range of terabytes. The operating system came with a desktop user interface, a built-in web browser and its own 3-D interface.

BeOS is currently used by a small group of programming enthusiasts. As BeOS provides a clean environment and the system is seen as simpler to maintain and evolve, many use it to develop simple object-oriented applications.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.