Once upon a time, BeOS held a lot of promise as an alternative to Windows and the Mac OS. However, the company ran out of money and BeOS disappeared from the scene in 2001 when Be's assets were sold to Palm, Inc. Enter yellowTAB GmBH. For the past few years, the company has been working on ZETA, the resurrection of BeOS.
Released in late June, ZETA 1.0 updates BeOS and integrates some parts of the OS (e.g., BONE and OpenGL) that never quite made it into an official BeOS release. The big question is how closely ZETA matches up to BeOS R5.
The ZETA kernel, derived directly from the BeOS kernel, is a small but modern operating system kernel that offers all the expected niceties such as memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. In addition, the use of pervasive multithreading extends to the kernel itself, so that low-level calls to the kernel itself are unlikely to bog the system down.
Jeremy Reimer gets down and dirty with ZETA 1.0, checking out the bundled applications and looking at how the technology that made up BeOS has stood up to the test of time.
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