BeIA: When Be Inc. Bet Everything on Internet Appliances [Part 6] #marchintosh

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:01]By the year 2000, Be Inc.  made a surprising decision.

[00:00:06]The company behind BeOS announced that  the desktop was no longer its future.

[00:00:11]Instead, Be would focus on something  called the Internet appliance.

[00:00:16]Small, always-connected devices  built entirely around the web.

[00:00:20]And at the center of that vision  was a new operating system: BeIA.

[00:00:26]Today, it’s mostly forgotten.

[00:00:28]But for a brief moment, Be  believed this was the future.

[00:00:34]It's obsolete technology no one uses  today, but I bring it back to life!

[00:00:40]I'm THE PHINTAGE COLLECTOR  and these are my stories.

[00:00:50]By the end of the 1990s, it  had become clear that BeOS, despite its technical strengths,  wasn’t going to win on the desktop.

[00:00:59]Little to no interest by OEMs left Be with  little path forward in the traditional PC market.

[00:01:06]At the same time, a new device category was  forming, the so-called internet appliance.

[00:01:12]These were built specifically for  email and web access, and had only limited local storage and processing power. They were clearly meant to behave more like consumer electronics, turning on  instantly and requiring no setup.

[00:01:28]Companies across the industry were exploring it.  Oracle Corporation pushed the Network Computer, Sun Microsystems had the JavaStation, and  Microsoft developed MSN Companion devices.

[00:01:42]BeIA, a heavily customized and  trimmed-down version of BeOS, was Be’s entry into that same space.

[00:01:50]And unlike BeOS, it actually  started to attract partners.

[00:01:55]Compaq signed a licensing deal to use BeIA, then  still called Stinger, in its internet appliances.

[00:02:02]Compaq’s IA-1 featured an AMD K6-2  at 266 megahertz, with 32 megabytes of RAM and 16 megabytes of flash storage. Other companies like FIC and Qubit announced their own BeIA-based devices, including the  Genesis 2000 terminal and a wireless web tablet with a 10.4 inch touchscreen. And then there was Sony.

[00:02:31]In 2001, Sony released the eVilla, one of  the only widely available BeIA systems.

[00:02:39]It used a 266 megahertz NSC Geode processor, 64  megabytes of RAM, and a portrait 15 inch display.

[00:02:48]As you’re going to see in a moment,  BeIA’s interface was entirely web-driven, with support for then-current technologies  like Macromedia Flash and Real media.

[00:02:59]But Be didn’t just ship BeIA as  a ready-to-run operating system.

[00:03:04]OEMs were given SDKs that allowed them to build  their own customized versions of the system, tailored to specific devices,  services, and user interfaces.

[00:03:15]But with Be long gone, information  on BeIA has largely disappeared, and even Be's own website provides  only incomplete information.

[00:03:24]Luckily, there are some BeIA SDKs and  development libraries on archive.org.

[00:03:31]Now, don't take me wrong here. I'm  grateful someone preserved all this.

[00:03:36]There's some annotations along with it,  even this one, which will become handy later on when trying to build BeIA. However, it's also superchaotic, with some things even duplicated, and it took  me really a hard time to piece it together.

[00:03:52]You'll find some Be documentation in  the archive. However, this one covers the user interface part only, but not  how to compile a custom system image.

[00:04:02]With that in mind, I began with  the BeIA DevKit Installer archive, which contains an installer  package called beia.pkg.

[00:04:11]I started with this one simply because it was  smaller than the other DevKit in the archive, so I assumed it to be an earlier version.

[00:04:20]The package installs through BeOS’ SoftwareValet,  which identifies it as Beta 3, dated May 12, 2000.

[00:04:29]Alongside some device drivers and documentation  files, again only related to UI customization, the DevKit installs an application called Wagner.

[00:04:40]Now, Wagner is where things get interesting.

[00:04:43]BeOS originally shipped with its own  browser, NetPositive. But for BeIA, Be chose not to extend their in-house  browser, which would have required significant work to support more modern  web standards like CSS and JavaScript.

[00:05:00]Instead, they licensed Opera 4.0 from  the Norwegian company Opera Software.

[00:05:06]Running Wagner on BeOS also reveals  something else. Unlike on BeIA devices, it can run in a windowed mode, and visually, it  still looks very much like a work in progress.

[00:05:19]But there wasn’t much to explore in this version.

[00:05:22]So I moved on to the second DevKit, version 2.5.

[00:05:27]This one was significantly larger,  and included additional components, including actual BeIA builds and a Flash kit.

[00:05:36]SoftwareValet identifies this  version as dating to September 2000.

[00:05:42]Also, the included Wagner interface looks a lot more polished and appealing when  compared to the earlier Beta 3.

[00:05:49]As mentioned already, the lack  of documentation makes this far from straightforward. But I'll  spare you most of my detours, guessing and interpretation, and instead  just show the process that finally worked.

[00:06:02]Fear not, I'm about to package all  of what you'll see in a moment, including the instructions and a  test VM, and drop it on archive.org In practice, it starts with installing  the BeIA SDK 2.5, as we just did.

[00:06:23]From there, you need to create a build directory  structure and register it in your bash profile.

[00:06:55]You’ll also need a few additional  build tools and libraries.

[00:07:21]And with that in place, you’re almost ready to run  the buildia script to generate your own release.

[00:07:28]Still, I had the impression some parts of the  SDK appear to be missing. I had expected there was some tooling or documentation on how  to actually define a custom BeIA build, for example selecting which  components to include or exclude.

[00:07:44]Instead, the SDK provides two prebuilt  releases in your home directory.

[00:07:50]For this demo, I simply took the Desktop  release and copied it into my build directory.

[00:07:56]Working from the prebuilt releases likely  means you could still modify them manually.

[00:08:02]But for now, I’m going to keep things simple, and just focus on building a  working flash image from there.

[00:08:11]From what I had learned, building a BeIA  flash image involves a step called crushing.

[00:08:17]This looks for repeating  patterns in the ELF binaries, things like common instruction sequences, and  stores them only once in a shared dictionary.

[00:08:27]That dictionary is then  loaded by the system at boot, and the compressed binaries  reference it to run normally.

[00:08:34]Once a binary is crushed, it’s no longer  a standard ELF file but a compressed ELF, often referred to as CELF. As a result, it will only run on a BeIA system that  has the matching dictionary loaded.

[00:08:48]The overall benefit is size. Crushing  reduces the overall system footprint significantly compared to a standard BeOS  installation. Typical images were 16 MB.

[00:09:00]However, on my VM the script kept stalling, at least until I increased the  RAM from 32 to 256 megabytes.

[00:09:09]That finally did the trick, and I  ended up with a working flash image.

[00:09:14]You’ll notice I used the SIZE environment  variable to generate a 64 megabyte image.

[00:09:20]That was mainly precautionary, since the  original Desktop build was around 64 megabytes, and I didn’t know how much space the  crushing process would actually save.

[00:09:31]In practice, I could have gone much smaller.  16 megabytes would easily have been enough.

[00:09:38]Now, since I’m running this inside 86Box, I  can’t directly attach a CompactFlash card.

[00:09:45]But since CompactFlash is essentially IDE, I  just attached a second virtual hard disk instead.

[00:09:51]I used a 70 megabyte disk here, again larger  than necessary, but sufficient for testing.

[00:09:58]The generated flash image already  contains a full MBR partition table, so it can be written directly to a raw disk.

[00:10:14]After transferring it over, I attached it to  another VM and used it as the primary boot device.

[00:10:21]And… here we are.

[00:10:23]My own, admittedly not very customized,  but fully self-built BeIA system.

[00:10:30]Unfortunately, I can't demo Wagner  accessing online content, as I didn't care for drivers such as for the network card. I’ll just leave that for future experimentation.

[00:10:41]And just in case you’re curious, you can  actually exit Wagner. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the task manager and kill the process, which then drops you into a very minimal  desktop, from where you can also launch a shell.

[00:10:56]Mr Know-it-All: May I comment on that?  This seems like a lot of effort done here. You could have just booted one  of the flash images from archive.org.

[00:11:05]Yes, that’s exactly what I tried first.

[00:11:08]But none of them would reliably boot on  my setup. Some stalled at the boot loader, others, especially those with a recovery  partition, failed during that phase.

[00:11:18]Most likely because I couldn’t match  my 86Box configuration to the exact hardware these images were originally built for.

[00:11:27]Only a few, like the Qubit, Compaq IA-1, and  Genesis 2000 images, gave hints about their target platforms, but not enough to fully  reproduce the systems to make them boot.

[00:11:41]I also tried writing those images  directly to a virtual disk from BeOS, just like I did with my own build,  but that didn’t make a difference.

[00:11:51]In the end, BeIA arrived  at exactly the wrong time.

[00:11:55]Devices like the Sony eVilla made  it to market, but only briefly.

[00:12:00]Within months, they were discontinued,  as the dot-com bubble had burst.

[00:12:05]Internet Appliances were typically tied  to online services or subscription models, which made them heavily dependent  on the internet economy.

[00:12:14]At the same time, personal computers kept  getting cheaper, more capable, and easier to use.

[00:12:21]And for most people, a full system turned out to be far more appealing than a  limited, single-purpose device.

[00:12:28]For Be Inc. that left very little room to recover,  the market they had bet on simply vanished.

[00:12:35]BeIA had been their second chance, but without  a market, it couldn’t carry the company forward.

[00:12:41]In 2001, Be sold their assets to  Palm, bringing the story to a close.

[00:12:47]And yet, looking back, the idea  itself wasn’t entirely wrong.

[00:12:52]The vision of always-connected, web-driven  systems did become reality, in smartphones, in web-first systems like Chromebooks,  and in countless embedded devices.

[00:13:02]Just not in the form Be and others  had imagined in the early 2000s.

[00:13:07]What about you? Did you ever come by  an internet appliance running on BeIA, or other internet appliances at the time?

[00:13:16]Share your stories in the comments below.

[00:13:18]I'm THE PHINTAGEC COLLECTOR and  this was my story for today.

[00:13:22]Thanks for watching and see you again next Sunday.