what would happen if an operating systemwas designed from the ground up for thefuture without any Legacy code that'sexactly the question that led Jean-Louisgasay former head of product developmentand marketing and Apple computer toleave its high level position and founda new hardware and software company beincorporated however you hardly hear ofb or their Flagship product POS thesedays why is that I'm distrover 39b andthis is the story of BLS100 times through Tangled threads andcorporate crimes[Music]after working at Apple computer for nineyears French executive Jean-Louis gasayresigned from his high-level job onMarch 2nd 1990. shortly after gasay andSteve Sacrament another ex-appleemployee founded bee Inc with the goalof creating a brand new software andHardware platform from scratch withoutall the Legacy corrupt common among theoperating systems of the time when b Incwas just getting started sakuman readthrough the dictionary to figure out aname to replace gase's idea of UnitedTech noids Inc no I am not joking whenSacrament told gasay that he got tiredand stopped at B gasay responded with Bis nice end of story and so it wasoriginally B wanted to be a hardwarecompany and buy an operating systeminstead of developing one in-househowever after negotiations fell flatwith an operating system called chorusOS they decided to develop an in-housekernel and operating system for The atntHobbit architecture developmentcontinued with an alpha in-house kernelbeing completed in 1992 and a graphicalinterface space beginning development in1993. however in 1994 tragedy struck atT discontinued The Hobbit processor dueto lack of Interest quickly B scrambledto choose a new CPU architecture andthey chose the powerpc CPU that Applestarted using a few years earlierthankfully a new compiler meant thatnearly the entirety of user space couldbe left unmodified and talented softwareEngineers Bob Harold and Cyril Marillaimported the kernel to their new powerpcprototype Hardware designed by JoePalmer this eventually became the beebox which we'll cover more in the nextsection while development of BOS and theb-box was going well B had run into aproblem quite simply they had no moneyleft in order to secure investors theydecided to go public with their projectthrough an unveiling at Agenda 95 whichseems to have been some sort of techshow despite a rocky setup the show wasa great success with investors anddevelopers alike lining up to give thecompany the money they desperatelyneededwhat about BOS wowed audiences so muchthe company went from near bankruptcy tohaving top-tier venture capitalistinvestors lined up let's talk about itwhile BOS was written from the ground upinspiration for its technical design wastaken from Mac OS Windows Unix and AmigaOS the operating system was designed foraudio and video tasks which at the timewere in their infancy and the smallexisting Market was dominated by Unixworkstations costing upwards of 10 000US Dollars BOS took some technicalinspiration from those machinesoperating systems with a mostly posixcompliant command line interfaceunix-like device management and a robustUnix inspired file system known as BFSBFS is a journaling file system meaningthat if the system is improperly shutdown the risk of corruption is very lowand a full disk check is rarelynecessary like most Unix systems BFS iscase sensitive and supports everyUnicode symbol besides the forward slashit supports very large files and disksUnix style attributes and built-inautomatic indexing as well BOS was alsovery fast with boot times being as lowas 10 seconds even on Hardware of thetime and this was at least partially dueto bfs's optimizations there's even awhole book about it take that Microsoftas your file system have a book writtenabout itoh never mind that another veryimportant design choice that aided inmaking BOS or robust multimediaoperating system was the inclusion ofsupport for multiple processors a fullymulti-threaded design from the kernel upand preemptive multitasking this furtherincreased the speed of the operatingsystem especially on computers with morethan one CPU and can vastly increasestability since if one applicationcrashed the rest of the system wouldalmost always be able to continuerunning without any issues whatsoeverexcept in the case of severe system ordriver related bugs the BOS desktop alsotook inspiration from all of theseoperating systems an example of this isthe dusk bar which is essentially across between the Mac OS menu bar andthe windows taskbar the desk barcontains the B menu which is similar tothe start menu of the time a clock asystem tray and an application switcherthe desk bar can be moved to any cornerof the screen squashed into a smallersize or expanded into a panel on the topor bottom of the desktop mostapplication Windows have tab title barsthat you can move to different sides ofthe window with a shift key this isdefinitely an interesting way to dowindow management that we really haven'tseen in many other operating systems Ithink a fully tab-based window managerwould be pretty cool at least in theoryBOS also supports up to 32 virtualworkspaces a feature originating on Unixthat wasn't added to Mac OS until 2007and windows until 2015. in terms ofpre-loaded applications BOS has theusual desktop programs like a filemanager web browser and media player butit also has some less common ones likean audio multi-tracking program called3D mix a web server called Poor Man'sweb server and a mostly posix compliantterminal several demos are included toshow off the capabilities of the OS suchas this spinning teapot thanks to theintelligent multi-threading of BOS allof these programs and more could be runat the same time without too much of aSlowdown even on Hardware of the timeaudio and video could also be synced upin real time without slowdown even onDual 66 megahertz power PC CPUs which isa testament to the operating system'soptimization the first Hardware to runboa West was the bee box designed to bedevelopers first introduction to theoperating system and apis it was notdesigned to be the platform for themasses yet with Jean-Louis gasay himselfstating that before we let you use thebee box we believe you must have someaptitude toward programming the standardlanguage is C plus plus the bboxoriginally shipped with dual powerpc 603CPUs running at a grand 66 megahertz upto 256 megabytes of RAM and a hard driveI wasn't able to find any data relatedto disk capacities but I'd imagine thedrive was anywhere from 500 megabytes to4 gigabytes in size unlike nearlyeverything else B did the b-box wasbuilt using mostly off-the-shelf partsand was one of the only machines to usethe powerpc reference platform standardfor its firmware however there werestill several custom Hardware componentssuch as the CPU monitor lights on thefront nicknamed the blinking lights anda 37-pin Electronics experimentationPort known as The Geek Port which issimilar in concept to the gpio pins onthe Raspberry Pi the b-box went on salesale for two thousand five hundreddollars at the end of nineteen ninetyfive over one thousand developers signedup to get the vbox but only a hundredwere available and most developers didnot receive their bee box until 1996 dueto be running out of money again anupgrade V box with 133 megahertzprocessors was released later that yearand there seemed to be some deals with aJapanese company to sell the b-box inJapan however before that happened onJanuary 30th 1997 the bee box wasdiscontinued less than 2 000 b-boxeswere sold before the discontinuation andB shifted Focus to the development oftheir operating system only shortlybefore the discontinuation of the beebox however BOS was ported to powerpcMacintosh computers and a few Macintoshclone manufacturers like power Computingsold machines with BOS installedalongside Mac OS in a dual bootconfiguration speaking of Macintosh inthe late 90s Apple computer reallywasn't doing too well specifically theMac OS software hadn't had a majorupdate since 1991 and was really showingits age with its lack of preemptivemultitasking meaning that if anapplication crashed it would bring theentire system down with a catastrophicfailure of the collagen and Copelandprojects the two in-house attempts atmodernizing the Mac OS Apple startedlooking to acquire an operating systemfor their computers Solaris Next StepWindows NT yes really and BOS wereconsidered and Jean Louis gasay andSteve sakaman gave then Apple CEO GilEmilio a demo of their operating systemwhile Emilia was impressed by the BOSApple did not end up buying b insteadbuying next computer for 427 million USdollars at the beginning of 1997. therewere several major factors involved inapple not buying B for one BOS wasn'tfinished and was missing some corefeatures such as language translationsand printer support some also consideredthe multi-threading method that BOS usedto be slower and inferior to competingmethods when dealing with largeapplications they couldn't come to anagreement on pricing either with Bwanting no less than 200 million USDollars and apple not offering more than125ml brilliant and I'm sure that adirect call from then next CEO SteveJobs ever heard of him to go Emilioallegedly warning him not to buy Bcouldn't have been too great for thedeal either Next Step became Apple'sNext Step God damn it I went throughthis entire video without making asingle bee pawn and broke my streak withthe next Punt and to this day Mac OS hasits roots in The Next Step operatingsystem despite Apple not buying it BOSwasn't dead not just yet after all theystill had their deal with power computeoh wait Macintosh clones aren't allowedanymore never mind that unless you wantto get sued soon it no longer ran on themax at all because of the new worldfirmware that it was never reported tohowever there was still one final hopefor BOS with the death of the Macintoshclone business and the introduction ofthe new world firmware on the iMac bos'spower PC days were over however B wasn'tdead just yet in 1997 and 98 BOS wasquickly ported to the Intel Pentium CPUthe first Intel supported and the firstnon-preview release of BOS BOS R3 wasreleased in March of 1998 at updatescontinue to be released over the nexttwo years and BOS gained somewhat of acult following but it never made itbeyond that stage B also released astripped down free version of BOS 5called BOS 5 personal Edition in Marchof 2000 along with a brief andunsuccessful stint in the internetAppliance market with the Sony e-villa aproduct that made it onto Timemagazine's list of the shortest Livetech products ever barely lasting longerthan this sentence and that wasbasically the end for B on November 132001 B Incorporated was acquired by Palmfor just 11 million US Dollars and thecompany was dissolved soon afterfollowing this acquisition B now underPalm filed a lawsuit against Microsoftalleging that they used monopolisticpractices to dissuade manufacturers frombundling non-windows operating systemslike BOS with PCS installed in a dualboot configuration with Windows bealleged that Microsoft quote threatenedto raise the price of Windows to Hitachiif Hitachi installed B's boot manager onits machines in September of 2003Microsoft and B reached a settlementwhere Microsoft paid B now under Palm23.3 million US Dollars while there areplans for a version of palm OS to bebased on BOS Technologies this operatingsystem was never actually sold on anydevices the BOS intellectual property iscurrently owned by access Co a Japanesetechnology company but they haven't doneanything within years shortly after Bsold to Palm a beta version of BOS wasleaked this version is codenamed Danoand reveals some future plans for theoperating system these include not yetworking 3D accelerated graphic supportUSB Mass Storage support Wi-Fi supportprinter support and improved Network APIknown as bone if Dano had been releasedbefore B went defunct maybe BOS wouldn'thave completely died but we'll neverknow for sure between the death of BOSand today several attempts have beenmade at continuing or recreating the OSthe code base of BOS was very possiblyillegally used to create the proprietaryZeta operating system which was soldfrom 2004 until access Co complained in2007. several reverse engine nearedRecreations of BOS have also existedwhich are perfectly legal includingseveral Linux based operating systemsthat were abandoned long ago however byfar the most popular and well-knownRecreation of bos's Haiku OS originallyknown as openbos development of haikubegan in 2002 and as of the time of thisvideo the latest release is the fourthbeta of R1 IQ OS is an open sourceoperating system written from scratchthat is source and binary compatiblewith BOS development remains active withabout One beta a year and Haiku OS canbe installed on Modern Hardware withgenerally pretty good Hardwarecompatibility minus GPU support thanksto Ports of many popular open sourceapplications and libraries Haiku OS is aperfectly usable desktop operatingsystem BOS Zeta and Haiku have alsofound a home on a handful of audio andvideo appliances Roland for example usedBOS for their Adderall DV7 editingAppliance and the company tune tracker'sradio broadcast automation software hasrun on BOS Zeta and Haiku OS Through TheYears there's a chance that the radiostation that you listen to on your wayto work might be running on Haiku OS andI don't know about you but personally Ithink that's pretty cool with all of itsfeatures it's not hard to wonder why BOSwas ultimately a commercial failure asusual the answer to that question iscomplicated however in my opinion theprimary cause of bees problems is thefact that they entered the market TooLate by that point there's alreadywindows in Mac OS and the only otheroperating system that has succeeded inthe PC market even a little bit Linux isgiven away for free and modifiable byanyone bees Only Hope at Generalrelevance passed in 1996 when Appledidn't acquire them and unless Apple hadgone on a business in the late 90s it'sunlikely B would have succeeded at allhowever despite the ultimate commercialfailure of BOS it's a very interestingfootnote in technological history andits story deserves to be told along withseveral others like next step and AmigaOS BOS and Haiku OS are some of myfavorite operating systems of all timeand I'm sad that more people don't knowabout them if you enjoyed this look backat one of the most interesting operatingsystems of all time consider giving thisvideo a like and subscribing to mychannel thank you so much for over 1 000subscribers the support it's receivedrecently is absolutely amazing with thatbeing said see you in October of 2027where I cover the rise and fall of thehuman raceforeign[Music]