Despite the lack of any news postings about it, and me only remembering due to them sharing a birthday with a friend of mine... Haiku turns 5 years old today. "Founded" with a mailing list posting by Michael Phipps on August 18th, 2001; OpenBeOS as it then was was set up to begin work on a replacement for BeOS - despite Be, Inc still being in existence. We reported on OpenBeOS's first, second birthday, third birthday, but somehow missed their fourth...

Initial progress on the project seemed to suggest a year, or less would be required for R1 to be released, however, as the developers later learnt, developing an operating system is not an easy job. However, five years on, Haiku boots on real hardware to an accelerated desktop, many R5 applications run, it has accessed the internet and performed tasks via USB that R5 is incapable of. It increases in capabilities and stability week on week, and should be capable of replacing R5 for the first few daring users by the end of the year if current progress is maintained.