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BeOS
Be Inc. began developing BeOS in 1991 for the BeBox computer. It was designed primarily for working with digital media and had many advanced features such as support for symmetric multiprocessing, preemptive multitasking, and a 64-bit journaling file system. Although not based on the Unix operating system, BeOS was at lease partially POSIX compliant and included a command-line interface through Bash. While earlier versions of BeOS were developer or preview releases, BeOS R3, released in March 1998, was the first full release and ran on both PowerPC and Intel x86 platforms.
BeOS R4 was released in November 1998 and was mostly a stability and performance update. It included updates to its user interface, browser, and networking, additional drivers for printers, networking cards, and sound cards, and the ability to start from either IDE or SCSI disk drives. File system support, USB, and graphics also received updates and enhancements. While the above desktop may look identical to that of BeOS R3.1, there are a few minor differences such as the inclusion of attached disk drives on the desktop and minor tweaks to the Deskbar. Also introduced in BeOS R4 were various "Window Decor" options that would alter the desktop appearance to mimic Amiga, Macintosh OS, or Windows desktops.
BeOS R4.5, released in June 1999, retained much of the same design and appearance of BeOS R4 with only minor updates. The Be logo in the Deskbar received a refresh, and the user interface also received minor updates. One particularly important new feature was the addition of saved queries. In addition to using the "Find" tool to search the system for specific files or folders, users could save their searches as a set of search parameters that could be edited and run again at a later date. While Apple had introduced a similar feature in Mac OS 8 with Sherlock, it wouldn't be until the release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Microsoft Windows Vista that either OS would have a similar, system-wide, self-indexing search engine.
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