Neal Stephenson once wrote that BeOS was the Batmobile of operating systems (Windows was a station wagon, MacOS was a European sports car and Linux was a free army tank). It was created in 1991. In 1997 its legendary file system, BFS was created. Be Inc sold to Palm in 2001, and BeOS was to become the foundation of PalmOS 6, which was never used in a Palm device. However, the ideas beyond BeOS live on Haiku, an open source clone of the OS.
Ars Technica has an interesting retrospective on the BeOS file system, BFS, which is now in use in both Haiku and SkyOS. BFS had many forward looking features, including 64-bit data structures, journaling and metadata support.
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The article includes a handy glossary of storage terms and interviews with a Be engineer responsible for BFS and Haiku developer Axel Dörfler. The Be engineer asked not to be named “to comply with the wishes of his current employer.”
There’s a good chance that employer is Google), which employees several former Be engineers.
Several ex-Be employees went to work for Danger after the company told to Palm. Some of them moved on to Android, which was co-founded by Danger co-founder Andy Rubin and acquired by Google. Others stayed on at Palm, but ended up joining Google after PalmSource (which was spun out of Palm) was acquired by Access.
According to Wikipedia Dominic Giampaolo, one of the main developers of BFS and author of Practical File System Design with the Be File System (PDF), has been working on file systems for Apple since 2002. One of the other key developers, Cyril Meurillon, is now a consultant.
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