I used to run BeOS on a Umax c600x280 Mac clone (PowerMax, Umax, Motorola days). I loved it because the UI was responsive. There was no lag. It also introduced me to the command line.
The previous year, I tried an mklinux install. I couldn't tell upside from down. I didn't know enough to "man" a command, let alone which commands to man.
I'm sad Be never became OS X. I wonder what Haiku/Be would be today. Remember the first OS X version? It was slow and buggy. 10.1 was usable.
Maybe Apple would've made a slow, buggy OS B. Back then, it was on.
Tiles answered the main part of your question (Steve Jobs), but to respond to the embedded part, Palm never did anything useful that I know of with their purchase of BeOS, which is unfortunate.
By the time Palm bought Be Inc., they had all but stopped doing anything useful with anything. Other than the Treo smartphone line they bought from Handspring, they only had a few good models from 2002-2005, and since then they've only achieved notability by not going bankrupt and instead getting bought.
The previous year, I tried an mklinux install. I couldn't tell upside from down. I didn't know enough to "man" a command, let alone which commands to man.
I'm sad Be never became OS X. I wonder what Haiku/Be would be today. Remember the first OS X version? It was slow and buggy. 10.1 was usable.
Maybe Apple would've made a slow, buggy OS B. Back then, it was on.