Be OS

BeOS was an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing modular I/O bandwidth, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and a custom 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS.

Both Be OS & NeXT was the in Apple's sight for acquiring a new OS back in the mid 90s; Apple chose NeXT, which comes with Steve Jobs as we all know now.

Reading Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_OS

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/30/forgotten_tech_beos/