(1) (Be, Inc., Menlo Park, CA) A software company founded in 1990 by Jean Louise Gassee, former head of R&D at Apple, that specialized in the BeOS operating system. BeOS was originally developed for Be's own PowerPC-based machine known as the BeBox. An advanced object-oriented operating system that supports multiprocessing and multithreading, BeOS was designed for multimedia applications, including 3D graphics.
The BeBox hardware was later dropped, and BeOS was made available for the Mac and x86 machines. An Internet appliance version (BeIA) was developed that lived a short time in a Sony handheld. Throughout 2001, BeOS was distributed by Gobe Software, which was the developer of an office suite for that environment (see
gobeProductive). In late 2001, the technology assets and intellectual property of Be were acquired by Palm.
(2) (
Big
Endian) See
byte order.