dsandler.org/wp

I just re-discovered the
GUI Gallery.
It’s a nice overview of graphical user interfaces past and present, and
it recently acquired some BeOS screenshots. Kudos!

Some clarification about the “5.1d0” screenshot:

This is a slightly crashy alpha/beta version of BeOS that was never
finished and was reportedly the last release before Be went out of
business.

The OS build referred-to as “5.1d0” was never finished, and was also
never released to the public. Many in the (fanatical) BeOS user
community assumed that the Next Big Release of BeOS, including several
major technological improvements that had independently been part of
public beta programs (OpenGL support and 3D hardware acceleration; a
completely-rewritten high-performance networking stack, BONE, the
configuration panel for which is in your screenshot), was “ready to
ship” and “sitting on Jean-Louis’ desk waiting to be released, and he’s
HOLDING OUT ON US ALL!”

Sadly, this was never the case — the desktop version of BeOS was
instead put on hold (no QA, no spit, no polish — it was pretty crashy
at times) while the company worked on BeIA. (BeIA was a
highly-customizable reinvention of BeOS for internet appliances, which
seemed like a possible business model that might actually turn into
money since developing an OS competing with Windows clearly didn’t.
BeIA only shipped on one appliance — the SONY eVilla, which had a
miserably short lifespan. It would be awesome to get some screenshots
of THAT, but I’m not sure if there are any available.)

What you see in the “5.1” screenshots is the desktop version of the OS
used internally at Be for development of BeIA, and not much else. It
was probably also included in some of the BeIA evaluation packages sent
to potential partners, and was probably leaked to the outside world from
there.

There’s a pretty good breakdown of the featureset of “Dano” in a posting
to a BeGroovy forum thread. There are other
links out
there too — just look around for
“Dano”.
(OS 5.0 was codenamed ‘Maui’; presumably there’s a sort of
Hawaii-5-0 tropical theme involved.)