If you’ve followed me on Twitter and my occasional posts you know that I have an unexplainable urge to have as many operating systems as I can, and just about my favorite is BeOS.  This book explains this ultralight, media oriented operating system in great detail.

The problem that the authors, Scot Hacker, Henry Bortman, and Chris Herborth, faced was the BeOS climate was always rapidly evolving and changing. How they solved this problem was to write their chapter segments then tie them together and allow the engineers to elaborate what they think is important. There are thirteen interviews and a foreword by Jean-Louis Gassee, the CEO and founder of Be Inc and former head of Macintosh development.

BeOS came onto my radar because Apple considered purchasing them in the nineties as a quick-way into a new operating system. We do know that NextStep won over Be, but it has an interesting and quirky history.

This book is only available through trade as this book was published in 1998 and doesn’t seem to have been updated since.

The BeOS Bible is available “new” on Amazon from $8.76.

The book’s original website is currently maintained with permission from PeachPit Press and includes many chapter excerpts at birdhouse.org.

(Publisher’s Summery)

The BeOS Bible is the largest, most complete guide to using, configuring, tweaking, and understanding BeOS — the world’s most efficient and intelligently designed operating system. BeOS is optimized from the ground up to excel at handling high-bandwidth audio/visual tasks (some call it “The poor man’s SGI”), and is radically fast, no matter what you’re doing. But being media-optimized doesn’t mean you can’t get your daily work done in BeOS too — the system makes even general productivity tasks a joy, thanks to features like fine-grained pervasive multithreading, a fully scriptable architecture, a sophisticated inter-application messaging model, symmetric multiprocessing, and real-time handling of all tasks.