An introduction to HAIKU

So a few years back, and by a few I mean over a decade, when music actually didn't make your ears bleed and you could pay for gas without selling your organs, there was this company called Be Inc. Ran by some great chaps, in sunny California, with a vision and the skills to make it happen.

They are the ones who brought us BeOS. An Os like no other in it's days. It was fast, it was easy to use but most important of all built from the ground up for the desktop and for the future. No legacy and no holding back.
It was built having in mind the concept of multiple cpu support and more threaded then an a sweater that is coming apart. This in a time that such an idea didn't exist for personal computing, even suggesting it might of got you burned on the stake.
BeOs was the os that all the other's wanted to be when they grew up and the rest of the industry agreed on this. It was the main contender for replacing the aging Mac Os before the return of Steve Jobs and his NeXTSTEP antics.

Sadly some good things do come to an end and a rather unpleasant one if I may say. Thanks to mounting debt and lets say somewhat less then legal pressure from Microsoft, the company got dissolved. All assets were bought by Palm Inc. And of course in true Palm spirit and tradition they were incompetent and managed to not do anything with this acquisition.

But as we all know the hardest thing to do is to kill a dream. So in 2001, right after the demise of Be Inc we see the birth of OpenBeos. All thanks to an amazing community that has been dedicated to keeping it's legacy alive and to create a product that is able to show us how the experience of desktop computing should have always been.
In 2004 after some legal issue with the BeOs trademark the decision was made to switch to the name HAIKU.

So here we are after a decade of hard work and we are seeing things truly crystallizing. HAIKU is steadily approaching feature completion and the anxiously awaited R1 release.

But I do believe that many of you would wonder why all this fuss over something from the 90's in an age of Mac Os X felines and Windows numbers. Or heck why do we need another open source os when we have Linux ...
Well the reason is quite simple. HAIKU just feels like a desktop should feel. This isn't something you can understand without giving it a try for yourself. The speed and the way it manages resources is on a completely different level then anything else you have tried.
It will boot and it will run faster then anything else on the same hardware.
Or maybe you have some old Pentium 3 laptop or desktop gathering dust somewhere, stick HAIKU on it and you might be surprised to notice that everything else will now seem slow.
This is the os that plays 720p HD video on my netbook with 20% processor use and 168 ram.

So head on down the projects website, grab the alpha 3 or the latest build and see for yourselves what im babbling about.