Not sure if anyone else even remembered this, but three days ago, a milestone in the BeOS world was passed, with five years since the build date of the leaked "Dano" release of BeOS 5.1 elapsing. Built on November 15th, 2001, the Intel- and binary-only leaked build included BONE, a new OpenGL stack with 3D acceleration for some cards, an overhauled media kit, and a completely new GUI design. New drivers included support for Radeon graphics, Conexant winmodems, non-Intel USB controllers, and early 802.11 wireless cards.

Dano's binaries would go on to become the basis of early versions of yellowTAB (now Magnussoft) ZETA; and despite its dodgy legality for most users, the additional hardware support and better networking (and hence more applications or better features in some apps) kept many a BeOS user going on the platform for a few years more.

This year, we also had five years of Haiku, the open source project to rewrite BeOS having started earlier in the year when it became clear that things were terminal in Menlo Park; which has made remarkable progress for a small project starting from close to nothing (the core NewOS kernel, OpenTracker and the MDR were all they really had to begin from) to having a relatively feature-complete BeOS R5 clone with some advanced features - including USB 2.0, OpenGL 1.5 with both software and hardware rendering support, GUI layout managment, and soon, a fairly BSD compliant networking stack.

Its been five years since Dano, but it could be as little as another one until Haiku is there or there-abouts in terms of features and capabilities.