Alternate Operating Systems

I've been playing around more with the BeOs, and am amazed how
efficient and fast it is. I've been doing things like playing
multiple videos and animations at the same time, with no apparent
slow downs. Not very amazing when using today's super powerful,
yet over taxed computer hardware. But considering I'm using an
old Powermac 7500 w/ a single 233MHz 604e and 512MB of RAM
running an operating system that's 15 years old - That's pretty
impressive. The BeOS also supports dual processing and G3 upgrades,
but there's no G4 processor support.

Too bad the BeOS didn't get much support from the major software
companies like Adobe and Microsoft. That's what killed the Amiga
and the BeOS. They just couldn't compete with Macs and PC's running
Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. Computers without professional and popular applications are pretty useless, except for the few hobbyist and tinkerers out there.

I wonder if it was the plan from the "get go" to design software
with bloated slow code, so people would have to spend more money and upgrade every few years. Just consider, we went to the moon with
computers not much more powerful than today's pocket calculators.
Now there's a good example of "slow" hardware accomplishing a
complicated and impressive task. Of course the mission got a lot
of help from very fast and efficient computers - The human brain.

There are just too many old computers in land fills. There's got to be
a better way. Maybe more licensing deals between hardware and software companies. I would love to here some other suggestions.

On the positive side, Apple's new Snow Leopard OS is 7GB smaller than
the previous version. That's a good sign. Although, it's Intel only,
meaning computers that are just a few years old are no longer supported. Rant Over.