I’m only a very minor developer, and my German is terrible - lots of the real, major developers are German - Axel, Marcus, Ingo, Waldermer, Micheal P and maybe more. But I’ll do my best, in English
BeOS was started around 1990 or 1991. It was released to the general public in late 1996 on PowerPC, and on Intel in 1998. The basic OS was made free in 2000, and the last official version was the same year. The history of BeOS as a whole is not terribly important, but during that time it ran on three architechtures - AT&T Hobbit, PowerPC and Intel x86. BeOS Release 5 had around 2 million downloads in total, but probably less than 40,000 users.
BeOS is agressively multi-threaded, feels very responsive to the user, runs well on old (1997 and earlier, even) hardware, and provides the ease of a Macintosh with the power of UNIX. However, its not alien to a Windows user.
Haiku, which was OpenBeOS, started in 2001 when Be went bankrupt. Development seemed to be going incredibly fast, but as the enthusiasm wore off it slowed down somewhat. However, by the end of 2002, many components of Haiku were able to replace BeOS components, even if only partially.
During 2003 and 2004, the Network Kit has become almost alpha-ready - it has PPP support, and many BeOS networking binaries run on it. The Media Kit is alpha-ready, as is the Printing kit. Many other parts are usable in full or partially, such as the Input Kit, the Screensaver Kit.
Most of the main developers are in Europe, although theres a large amount in the USA as well. The main developers are in Germany, which might help your show a bit :lol: Axel, the Kernel lead, Marcus, the Media lead, Ingo, who’s doing Storage work, Waldermer, whos doing PPP work, and Micheal Pfeiffer, whos doing Printing work.
As goes BFS - its multi-threaded, 64 bit, fully journaled, indexing, somewhat fragmentation resistant - my two year old BFS has lasted power outages, crashes, lots of compilation and other things that cause filesystem strain without major problems.
I’ll add more later, or someone else can.