BeOS

"The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS."

"Thank God that [Apple buying BeOS] didn’t happen, because I hated Apple's management. I couldn’t picture myself in there."

"BeOS was pretty good, mind you. Positioned as a multimedia platform, BeOS benefited from symmetric multiprocessing, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and BFS, a custom 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. It too was developed on the principles of clarity and an uncluttered design."

"If operating systems were judged purely on engineering, BeOS would be remembered as one of the greatest desktop OSs ever built. Instead, it became a footnote. Not because it was slow. Not because it was unstable. Not because it was badly designed. But because it showed up at the wrong time, against the wrong opponents, in an industry where technology alone doesn’t win."