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Overview: IRIX 6.5 is a 64 bit, POSIX compliant, UNIX 95 certified operating system designed by Silicon Graphics. It is geared for high-performance processors and optimized for multiprocessor, media-based systems. IRIX excells at tasks such as 3D modeling, animation, multi-tasking, imaging and visual simulation while still being a good choice for business and scientific applications. IRIX runs on Silcon Graphics systems and offers both a user friendly GUI and a command line environment. While this OS is more expensive than most, it makes up for the difference in cost by offering a powerful product with built in system administration features, advanced network options and good error recovery. Approximately 1000 software titles exist for BeOS.

Info: IRIX 6.5 installs on Silicon Graphics and comes in two versions, Advanced Server Environment (ASE) and Advanced Workstation Environment (AWE) which installs on all SGI workstaions. The IRIX desktop supports multiple formats including Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Korean.

IRIX has the capability to understand common file types and disk formats, so you can read and copy files from other operating systems. IRIX is expandable up to 128 processors to meet your performance and productivity needs. IRIX 6.5 features XFS, a 64-bit journalled file system which allows virtually unlimited filesystems and file sizes numbering in the terabytes, parallel dump and restore capability, a guranteed I/O rate, and millions of files in a single directory.

Error recovery with IRIX 6.5 is also a good selling point. You can set up the optional XVL, the IRIX Volume Manager to automatically mirror disks for replacement without taking the system down. IRIX 6.5 also has the capability to take periodic snapshots of a program so that, in the event a program crashes, you can restart it and resume work wherever the last snapshot occured. Many of the nicer benefits of IRIX 6.0 are unfortunately, optional.

IRIX 6.5 supports many networking schemes such as 100 base-T, FDDI and HIPPI-800.

BeOs was originally designed for use on PowerPC-based systems however, it runs well alongside a "general purpose OS" such as Windows 9x or the Mac OS. (See the BeOs home page for current processor support information.)

Technical Info:
Minimum requirements for Intel based processor.

A BeOS Ready processor and motherboard chipset.
64 megabytes of RAM recomended.
An IDE or SCSI hard disk or hard disk partition with 150 megabytes of space.
An IDE/ATAPI or SCSI CD-ROM drive.
A graphics card capable of VESA graphics.
USB, PS/2, or serial connected mouse and keyboard.

BeOS for Intel Architecture is compatible with all Pentium-compatible processor(s), including the following:

Intel Celeron, Intel Pentium, Intel Pentium MMX, Intel Pentium Pro, Intel Pentium II
Intel Pentium II Xeon ,Intel Pentium III ,Intel Pentium III Xeon
AMD Athlon ,AMD K6, K6-2, K6-III
Cyrix 686MX, 686GXm (but not the M1)
IDT WinChip C6, WinChip 2
Rise mP6

BeOS should run on any truly Pentium-compatible processor, whether it's on this list or not. As long as it is an Intel Pentium or true clone, it should work. More information on BeOs compatability can be found here.

Pros/Cons:

Pros: BeOS is a powerful 64 bit operating system expandable up to eight processors.
Pros: BeOS features a well designed GUI which is very user friendly.
Pros: BeOS can be easilyloaded next to WIN 9x, UNIX, Mac, or Linux.
Pros: BeOS is available for $100.00 est
Cons: Limited number of software titles available (though more are always on the way).

Price: BeOs 4.0 is priced at $100.00 est.

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