Be Inc founder and chief executive office Jean-Louis Gassee poured cold water on the possibilities of an Intel version of the BeOS operating system when the rumors first surfaced at the end of last year (CI No 3,068), but a lot has happened since then, and now Be has chosen the week of Macworld Expo to demonstrate the prelude to its next release – BeOS for Intel. Be told attendees at its developers conference, taking place alongside Macworld in Boston this week, that the company would be simultaneously releasing Intel and PowerPC versions of the next release of its operating system, due out next January. Our goal is to meet the needs of customers doing digital content design no matter what hardware platform they may be using, Gassee told developers, but admitted the addition of Intel support would enable the company to expand the market and business foundation for BeOS developers. Demonstrations showed identical working between the two systems, including the running of re-compiled source code and multi-processing support on both Intel and PowerPC systems. BeOS styles its operating system a Media OS, and claims it removes the limitations and complexities of the aging architectures of current mainstream operating systems – namely MacOS and now Windows 95 and Windows NT. Be said that Intel Corp had been helping and encouraging it to make the move.
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