A computer operating system developed by Be, Inc., a company that was founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassée, a former president of Apple’s product division.
BeOS is a preemptive multitasking operating system with symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support and an object-oriented set of application programming interfaces (APIs) optimized for real-time digital multimedia and communication functions.
Because of this, BeOS is sometimes called a “media OS” to emphasize its multimedia capabilities. BeOS runs on Intel-based platforms and certain PowerPC-based hardware, and it includes basic TCP/IP support and services. On a PowerPC, you can even run the MacOS as a shell within the BeOS desktop interface.