How do you think, can BeOS be considered a *NIX system? Hmm, the PE5 edition works better on my box than ony Linux... say, a trivial thing-nvidia drivers. I have a GF6200, to this moment it worked only on winbarf. But the BeOS drivers work very well. Even 3d Accel. Come to that, maybe BeOS is not that old...? Too bad Be Inc died.
Sorry, just had to throw this nostalgia out of myself.

Be could have been really popular, and at one point they had a contract with a major system integrator (either Gateway or Compaq, if I remember correctly) to be installed as a second OS (next to M$, of course). The problem was that it never was added to any boot selector, so the user would only see Windows and ~1-5G drive space used for "Other". The company sold the business to Palm, but stayed open long enough to continue their lawsuit against M$ (it settled for ~$23M out of court and is being distributed to shareholders).

The OS has been recently reincarnated as Zeta, along with a few open source clones (OpenBeOS, Haiku, etc). Although limited in information, the info on Wikipedia makes for an interesting read. I got a copy of it a while back, but never really got into it.

BTW, even though it used bash as a command shell, and was POSIX complient in some areas, it was never a *nix OS. It was designed from the ground up as a GUI os (kind of like Gem on the Atari computers).

Yeah, but Zeta and Haiku (OpenBeOS) are not the same...
Why the past tense? I'm writing this on an Mozilla Firefox 1.5 running in BeOS 5 PE MAX! Edition. Free to download. I agree, It is not an *NIX, but it retains a pretty similar structure. I must say, that I got really sucked into Be just a few days ago. Before then, it was justa another alternative OS to me... now it occupies the first and default position in GRUB, second- Debian, third-winbarf and last- my very own in-development GNU/HURD.