BeNews
BeNews (1998-2002) was the leading community news site for BeOS, the multimedia operating system developed by Be, Inc.
I co-founded BeNews with Adrian Ziemkowski and Shafer Stockton. Around midnight on October 18th, 1998, Adrian and I had the idea; six hours later the first page of news was live at benews.com. I was News Editor and one of the developers, per the October 1999 masthead, and wrote about 200 stories. My staff page listed me as “editor, reviewer, editorialist, and official BeNews supermodel,” from Clarkdale, Arizona. The site was “the place with more Be news,” covering software releases, hardware guides, developer interviews, and community events for the passionate BeOS user base.
What was BeOS?
BeOS was an operating system built from scratch in the mid-90s for multimedia and real-time performance. It was way ahead of its time — true multithreading, a 64-bit journaling file system, and a beautiful, responsive UI. Many of us who used it still miss it. The NetPositive browser’s haiku error messages remain iconic.
The site
The chrome BeNews banner logo, 1999.
A BeNews logo redesign sheet with four options, 1999.
BeNews had everything a community news site needed: daily news updates, forums, polls, interviews (the BeNews Spotlight), features, a glossary, a software tracker (run by BeBits after we partnered with them), and even a store. Two months in we had 13 team members and 270 stories. By our first birthday BeNews Corporation was a Delaware corporation with 17 people on three continents, doing about 17,000 hits a day, and all of it was written in Eddie on BeOS. It was served by PHP and Apache from a dual Pentium II 350 running FreeBSD, and we were building the BeNews Stylus, a BeOS app for editing the whole site, per Inside BeNews.
We covered COMDEX Fall 98 in Las Vegas a month after launch (including an interview with Jean-Louis Gassée), CeBIT, and the BeGeistert user group meetups in Germany, plus everything from Mozilla ports (BeZilla) to audio production software. The four-day BeNews BeOS 4.5 Extra ran to nearly a hundred pages. When Be Magazine was cancelled in January 2000, its finished first issue was published on BeNews instead. And when Be stopped running its Masters Awards, Scot Hacker created the BeNews Guru Awards to recognize the best BeOS software and developers, with winners announced at BeGeistert 005 in October 2000.
The BeNews Extra graphic for the BeOS 4.5 release, June 1999.
Adrian was the primary co-founder: Editor-in-Chief and webmaster for the first year, then President and CEO, until he left at the end of 1999 for a web development job at Be, Inc. itself. I posted that news on the site with a statement from him, per his December 1, 1999 staff note. Shafer was our sysadmin and got us free colocation at the ISP where he worked. Oliver Thylmann joined early from Be Leading Edge and BeView, ran the Spotlight interviews, and later ran the company. Scot Hacker, author of the BeOS Bible, took over as Editor-in-Chief after Adrian’s first year. Eugenia Loli started in late 1999 doing Software of the Week and polls, and ended up running the news through 2001. Ernst Eeldert from Holland, Seth Flaxman, Sean Graham, Thijs Stalenhoef, Hans Speijer, Hendrik-Jan Verheij, Eric Lanehart, Dan Cederholm, Nate Mook, Kurt von Finck, Matt Lewinski, Peter Schultz, Masashi Takemoto and many others from the global BeOS community filled out the team. I attended BeGeistert 005 in Düsseldorf in October 2000 while living in Belgium for a year, which made three BeNews guys at the show.
In March 2000 we also took over the Media Center that Mike Popovic had started at Be Dope: BeOS backgrounds, icons, buttons, banners, songs about BeOS, and skins for audio players like CL-Amp and SoundPlay. I made a BeOS-themed skin myself (jwskin) — gotta represent.
One of the joke logo variants, starring the official BeNews supermodel, 1999.
The end
Be, Inc. sold its assets to Palm in 2001 and BeOS development stopped. BeNews went dark for three weeks that August with server and Perl problems, came back with Eugenia catching everyone up on the petitions and the Palm news, then crashed again. On December 6, 2001 the 15-member team posted a notice saying that with the server problems continuing and “the general enthusiasm having died down,” it was time to put up an archive instead, covering stories from October 1998 to July 21, 2001. Eugenia and most of the staff resigned at the end of the month, and she went on to become editor-in-chief at OSNews. Oliver kept posting the odd story into March 2002. By that August benews.com was a register.com parking page. The BeOS spirit lives on in Haiku, an open-source reimplementation that continues to this day.
See also
- Tave Imagination — “Photoshop for BeOS” that I also co-founded
Links
- BeNews on Wayback Machine (March 2001 snapshot)
- Inside BeNews — the October 1999 masthead and server specs (Wayback snapshot)
- Haiku OS — open-source BeOS reimplementation
- BeOS on Wikipedia
Related sites from the era: