Tenzin Togden submitted a thoughtful article on what the Haiku OS means to him, personally, and what he expects for the future.

Without further ado...

What Haiku OS means to me at this point in time, from the department of "What do you mean did I run the OS before writing an article about it?"

To know this, I have to be clear what BeOS has meant and does mean to me now. It will always mean a young operating system that installed quickly and impressed me immediately after my first time booting with the R4.5 Live Demo CD.

At that time I was using the SUSE Linux distribution, Dr. DOS, Windows 95 and Mac OS. It became my Media OS and I was happy working in BeOS. The media capabilities and speed of BeOS still impress me today.

I spent four years in Asia, away from computers and news until very recently. When I returned and began reading The BeOSJournal, I was shocked. Be, Inc. was no more, the BeOS was not available and there were no more upgrades to be found.

I learned that Haiku was to be the open source clone of BeOS R5 on x86 only. Ok.

I hope it can live up to the (perhaps excessive) expectations I have. The fact that BeOS doesn't run so well on my modern IBM ThinkPad, (except in Virtual PC 2004 in Windows 2000 where it rocks!), as it did on the earlier compatible equipment I used for BeOS before, does not change my high opinion of BeOS or expectations of Haiku.

I am looking forward to Haiku being my media OS, on modern hardware, with multiple fast CPUs and high memory. I am also looking forward to better networking than I know BeOS has now. In my earlier use of BeOS I never used it for networking or connecting to the internet, and had no knowledge of the problems others had and continue to have with it.

I have always felt BeOS was brilliant for scientific visualisation, as is done often on SGI and Sun workstations, especially for biochemistry. To use Haiku for the same purpose(s) is to me logical, and I hope this becomes a real possibility one day.

The area of artificial intelligence has always interested me, as has clustering; I am convinced Haiku could fulfill this application as well. I have often mused that if Be, Inc. had shifted focus to a "BeAI", instead of a "BeIA", things might have evolved differently.

An embeddable appliance-oriented Haiku? Why not, if people need it? A server/router/gateway OS? If it is possible I would use it.

Reading the official Haiku OS website FAQ and what is said in various chat rooms regarding Haiku, I can say all of my expectations are reasonable. It is open source and can be compiled to suit any specific set of purposes or needs. So far Haiku is an x86-only Operating System, but I know it can be compiled for other platforms such as Power PC.

What does all of this add up to? I think Haiku will impress me as much as BeOS orignally did, and I look forward to seeing it develop into a full-fledged Operating System. I have made a point of not discussing any technical details of OS design here, without too much emphasis or analysis. Instead, I have discovered the inherent beauty in how BeOS has changed the way I use all operating systems completely. To that end, I feel Haiku will change the way many people use their computers.

Tenzin Togden