Like an upgrade to an old building, cruft always seems like a good idea when the first layers of it go on--just routine maintenance, sound prudent management. This is especially true if (as it were) you never look into the cellar, or behind the drywall. But if you are a hacker who spends all his time looking at it from that point of view, cruft is fundamentally disgusting, and you can't avoid wanting to go after it with a crowbar. Or, better yet, simply walk out of the building--let the Leaning Tower of Pisa fall over--and go make a new one THAT DOESN'T LEAN.

For a long time it was obvious to Apple, Microsoft, and their customers that the first generation of GUI operating systems was doomed, and that they would eventually need to be ditched and replaced with completely fresh ones. During the late Eighties and early Nineties, Apple launched a few abortive efforts to make fundamentally new post-Mac OSes such as Pink and Taligent. When those efforts failed they launched a new project called Copland which also failed. In 1997 they flirted with the idea of acquiring Be, but instead they acquired Next, which has an OS called NextStep that is, in effect, a variant of Unix. As these efforts went on, and on, and on, and failed and failed and failed, Apple's engineers, who were among the best in the business, kept layering on the cruft. They were gamely trying to turn the little toaster into a multi-tasking, Internet-savvy machine, and did an amazingly good job of it for a while--sort of like a movie hero running across a jungle river by hopping across crocodiles' backs. But in the real world you eventually run out of crocodiles, or step on a really smart one.

Speaking of which, Microsoft tackled the same problem in a considerably more orderly way by creating a new OS called Windows NT, which is explicitly intended to be a direct competitor of Unix. NT stands for "New Technology" which might be read as an explicit rejection of cruft. And indeed, NT is reputed to be a lot less crufty than what MacOS eventually turned into; at one point the documentation needed to write code on the Mac filled something like 24 binders. Windows 95 was, and Windows 98 is, crufty because they have to be backward-compatible with older Microsoft OSes. Linux deals with the cruft problem in the same way that Eskimos supposedly dealt with senior citizens: if you insist on using old versions of Linux software, you will sooner or later find yourself drifting through the Bering Straits on a dwindling ice floe. They can get away with this because most of the software is free, so it costs nothing to download up-to-date versions, and because most Linux users are Morlocks.

The great idea behind BeOS was to start from a clean sheet of paper and design an OS the right way. And that is exactly what they did. This was obviously a good idea from an aesthetic standpoint, but does not a sound business plan make. Some people I know in the GNU/Linux world are annoyed with Be for going off on this quixotic adventure when their formidable skills could have been put to work helping to promulgate Linux.

Indeed, none of it makes sense until you remember that the founder of the company, Jean-Louis Gassee, is from France--a country that for many years maintained its own separate and independent version of the English monarchy at a court in St. Germaines, complete with courtiers, coronation ceremonies, a state religion and a foreign policy. Now, the same annoying yet admirable stiff-neckedness that gave us the Jacobites, the force de frappe, Airbus, and ARRET signs in Quebec, has brought us a really cool operating system. I fart in your general direction, Anglo-Saxon pig-dogs!

To create an entirely new OS from scratch, just because none of the existing ones was exactly right, struck me as an act of such colossal nerve that I felt compelled to support it. I bought a BeBox as soon as I could. The BeBox was a dual-processor machine, powered by Motorola chips, made specifically to run the BeOS; it could not run any other operating system. That's why I bought it. I felt it was a way to burn my bridges. Its most distinctive feature is two columns of LEDs on the front panel that zip up and down like tachometers to convey a sense of how hard each processor is working. I thought it looked cool, and besides, I reckoned that when the company went out of business in a few months, my BeBox would be a valuable collector's item.

Now it is about two years later and I am typing this on my BeBox. The LEDs (Das Blinkenlights, as they are called in the Be community) flash merrily next to my right elbow as I hit the keys. Be, Inc. is still in business, though they stopped making BeBoxes almost immediately after I bought mine. They made the sad, but probably quite wise decision that hardware was a sucker's game, and ported the BeOS to Macintoshes and Mac clones. Since these used the same sort of Motorola chips that powered the BeBox, this wasn't especially hard.

Very soon afterwards, Apple strangled the Mac-clone makers and restored its hardware monopoly. So, for a while, the only new machines that could run BeOS were made by Apple.

By this point Be, like Spiderman with his Spider-sense, had developed a keen sense of when they were about to get crushed like a bug. Even if they hadn't, the notion of being dependent on Apple--so frail and yet so vicious--for their continued existence should have put a fright into anyone. Now engaged in their own crocodile-hopping adventure, they ported the BeOS to Intel chips--the same chips used in Windows machines. And not a moment too soon, for when Apple came out with its new top-of-the-line hardware, based on the Motorola G3 chip, they withheld the technical data that Be's engineers would need to make the BeOS run on those machines. This would have killed Be, just like a slug between the eyes, if they hadn't made the jump to Intel.

So now BeOS runs on an assortment of hardware that is almost incredibly motley: BeBoxes, aging Macs and Mac orphan-clones, and Intel machines that are intended to be used for Windows. Of course the latter type are ubiquitous and shockingly cheap nowadays, so it would appear that Be's hardware troubles are finally over. Some German hackers have even come up with a Das Blinkenlights replacement: it's a circuit board kit that you can plug into PC-compatible machines running BeOS. It gives you the zooming LED tachometers that were such a popular feature of the BeBox.

My BeBox is already showing its age, as all computers do after a couple of years, and sooner or later I'll probably have to replace it with an Intel machine. Even after that, though, I will still be able to use it. Because, inevitably, someone has now ported Linux to the BeBox.

At any rate, BeOS has an extremely well-thought-out GUI built on a technological framework that is solid. It is based from the ground up on modern object-oriented software principles. BeOS software consists of quasi-independent software entities called objects, which communicate by sending messages to each other. The OS itself is made up of such objects, and serves as a kind of post office or Internet that routes messages to and fro, from object to object. The OS is multi-threaded, which means that like all other modern OSes it can walk and chew gum at the same time; but it gives programmers a lot of power over spawning and terminating threads, or independent sub-processes. It is also a multi-processing OS, which means that it is inherently good at running on computers that have more than one CPU (Linux and Windows NT can also do this proficiently).

For this user, a big selling point of BeOS is the built-in Terminal application, which enables you to open up windows that are equivalent to the xterm windows in Linux. In other words, the command line interface is available if you want it. And because BeOS hews to a certain standard called POSIX, it is capable of running most of the GNU software. That is to say that the vast array of command-line software developed by the GNU crowd will work in BeOS terminal windows without complaint. This includes the GNU development tools-the compiler and linker. And it includes all of the handy little utility programs. I'm writing this using a modern sort of user-friendly text editor called Pe, written by a Dutchman named Maarten Hekkelman, but when I want to find out how long it is, I jump to a terminal window and run "wc."