Yesterday as I took a break from my rapid and scary transformation into yuppie scum I decided to look up an old friend: BeOS!

Back in the day when I still had things like beliefs and values and such I used to use BeOS as my regular desktop operating system! Many a night was spent curled up by the warm glow of my old CRT with Scott Hacker’s BeOS Bible or cruising sites such as BeBits or BeNews, or typing away on BeShare!

When the company went tits-up a few years back a few efforts emerged to make an open-source version of the stupendously fast and fun OS. Well, the OpenBeOS project has morphed into the HaikuOS project, and after a few false starts they have a new release which includes…NETWORK SUPPORT!

Support is fairly basic at the moment, but as you can see from the screenshot below, FTP now works, so there is a viable way of updating the system and adding software. Now I can sit at my desk, and in between drinking my Starbucks coffee and studying up on stodgy corporate Microsoft, Apple, and VMWare systems I can daydream of a system that nimbly runs BeOS once more. Maybe in a few more months my daydreams can become alpha-release frustrating realities!

I miss those fucking yellow tabs.

BeOS, haiku, network support