Melbourne, Australia.
Saw BeOS R4.5 demonstrated at computer trade show one thursday in September 1999, 2 days later (Saturday) purchased BeOS R4.5 CD, BeOS Bible (Scot Hacker), Programming BeOS, from Technical Book Store in city center. Coincidently, on same day got Adobe Premier 5.1 and DVRaptor firewire card for Windows. Suprisingly, BeOS R4.5 supported DV Raptor video codec out of the box, and Quake 2 had HW accelerated OpenGL drivers (Voodoo 3 3000). Best OS ever.
Then purchased R5 Pro, Gobe 2.0, some games, Zeta 1.0, Zeta 1.5, donated some time/money to Haiku.
Currently working on native Video Editor for Haiku, and a few games (soccer, Civ clone etc). In a decade or two they might be released ā¦
Iām an old BeOS user, playing with BeOS since 1999, that was R4.5. Never stopped since then. Did some programming too, BeBits had three my works.
I have the BeOS Bible too. It lead to an anecdotical case: once I, reading the BeOS Bible, was riding a bus to the university I was studying at, and Jehovaās witness saw the title with āBibleā in it and sat along with me, starting the conversation. We talked for some twenty minutes, mainly discussing problems of command lines, daemons and getting rid of zombies, and split with both of us thinking the other donāt have a clue in the subjectā¦
I wasnāt a real BeOS user back in the day but I tried out the R5 Personal Edition (I think it was called; the one that could be installed and started from Windows or Linux) and was quite impressed by it. Shortly after that BeOS was discontinued.
Been following Haiku rather passively on and off since about 2010.