Remember back when Apple first started shopping around for outside operating system technology to replace the jumbled mess of unreleasable code known as Copland? Before Steve Jobs' NeXT was even a blip on Apple's radar screen, everyone thought the shoe-in would be Be. The BeOS was a fledgling effort, to be sure (at the time it couldn't even print), but it ran on PowerPC-based Macintosh hardware, was fully modern and multithreaded from the ground up, and had been designed as an operating system that could handle the demands of working with digital media, which seemed to mesh quite well with the needs of Apple's core professional markets. Several publications had gone so far as to print that Apple's purchasing of the BeOS as the foundation of the next-generation Mac OS was as good as done-- leading to some embarrassing "Dewey Defeats Truman" moments when Jobs and his Amazing Technicolor Reality Distortion Field managed to persuade Apple that buying NeXT for $400 million was a better deal. (In our opinion, that turned out to be true, if for no other reason than it got Jobs back into Apple and ready to turn things around, but at the time many considered it a strange choice.)

Since then, you may not have heard a whole lot from Be, but they're still busy little workers, buzzing hither and thither and continuing to craft their new operating system. One of the reasons we don't hear so much about them on the Mac side of the fence is because the latest releases don't run on the latest Power Macs; Apple refuses to provide Be with the G3 specs necessary to get the OS running on the new hardware. So Be has turned its attention to the Intel world, and AtAT was present at the Be Developers Conference a couple of years ago when the BeOS was first revealed to run on Pentium hardware. (That was also the moment at which we started to lose interest in the whole thing.) In fact, Intel has stuck a whole lot of cash into Be-- about a 10% stake-- probably in hopes of building up some real honest-to-goodness operating system competition for Microsoft.

That Intel money was apparently enough to get Be far enough along to file for an IPO-- which is just what they're doing, according to AAPL Investors. A Bloomberg report states that Be hopes to raise about $57 million from going public, even though the company warns that they "have only one product that may never gain broad market acceptance." That's not stopping them, though, and we just have to admire any company willing to take on the Redmond Giant, so we wish them the best of luck with their IPO and getting the BeOS into the public eye. Meanwhile, we Mac users still have a long while to wait before we really get to enjoy the OS fruits of the NeXT buyout in the form of Mac OS X, due (hopefully) some time before we all die...