After Jean-Louis Gassée left Apple in 1990, he started his own company, Be Inc., like Steve Jobs. was founded in 1991. Not only did he develop a computer with a RISC-based “Hobbit” processor developed by At&T, he also started preparing an operating system for this computer. The computer was called BeBox, but in 1995 AT&T stopped developing the Hobbit processor and Gassée’s computer design fell through. Gassée was not one to give up easily, he immediately equipped his computer with two 66 Mhz PowerPC 603 processors, since the operating system he prepared was written in C and C++ language, it was easily adapted to the new processor and BeBox met the user in January 1996. Those who bought the computer were very satisfied with the product. The “blinkenlight” LED lights showing the processor performance on the computer case and the operating system with stable, isometric icons pleased everyone.

But since producing computers is an expensive and troublesome business, Be Inc. He turned to the software business, while using PowerPC chips at Apple, he adapted the operating system to work at Apple. Gassée’s aim was to sell BeOS to Apple, since Apple was having trouble with the operating system at that time, but Apple did not accept the high price he wanted and Gassée’s dreams fell apart. Since Apple decided not to share information about its hardware with software developers until they could develop an operating system in the following years, the development of BeOS on Apple computers ended and it turned towards Intel X86 architecture.

In March 1998, BeOS R3 was released for both PowerPC and X86 based computers. Version R4 became available for x86 only in early 1999, and R4.5 in mid-1999.

In 2000, it distributed the BeOS R5 version free of charge as a 512 MByte file that can run from within Windows. This version, which reached more than 1 million people, made BeOS popular with the masses. The R5 Professional Edition, on the other hand, was sold for US$99 as a complete operating system.

BeOS R5 attracted great attention with its stable structure and its ability to play media as an alternative to Windows. Most freeware and shareware tools produced for previous versions have been updated for R5. However, developing an operating system for the PC was an extremely arduous task. Gassee was well aware of this. It was very, very difficult to write device drivers that would be updated frequently for each hardware and use the full capabilities of the device, to provide support to users, and to ask 3rd party manufacturers to provide BeOS support.

Taking all this into account, Gassée took advantage of the popularity of BeOS and sold all its rights to Palm in 2001.

After the 5.1 beta version of BeOS, it went hand in hand and was used for a while under the name Dano. After announcing that it would not develop Palm BeOS, YellowTAB and Magnussoft released BeOS Zeta versions. BeOS continued its development as open source code under the name of Haiku OS in the following years and still continues to do so.