One of the hallmarks of the PowerCenter 150 (and most of the 604 based Power Macs and clones) is the ability for these computers to run the Be Operating system. The OS is marketed by Be,Inc. and is available to owners of 603 and 604 Power Macs as well as many Pentium based PCs.

There have been reports of some people getting BeOS to run on G3 Power Macs.

One of the requirements on the Mac side is that the Power Mac running BeOS be used with OS 8.6 or lower (probably to Mac OS 7.5). My Powercenter 150 Mac clone originally shipped with OS 7.6.1. It ran BeOS v.2 in conjunction with this OS 7.6.1.

The Be OS is known for being a very stable operating system and features pre-emptive multi-tasking. This means that if an application crashes, it does not bring the whole OS down. This feature was not available on all Macintoshes running the Classic Mac OS. Pre-emptive multi-tasking became available when Apple switched to the Unix based OSX. That said for a long time, whenever a BeOS application crashed, only the app would close down but not the entire operating system. That was nice.

BeOS 5 was the last Power PC version of the operating system available.

HOW TO INSTALL BEOS ON YOUR POWER PC SYSTEM

Be sure that your Power PC Macintosh has System 7.6 to 8.6 installed. The Power PC must be a 603 or 604 desktop model. It is best to install BeOS on a separate hard drive (probably an external hard drive) with at least 150 to 200 MB of free space. I'd opt for a 500MB partition or larger drive space. You will need space to install additional applications (if you can find them).

1. Set up your 2nd hard drive. Create a volume or partition with a standard Mac utility program.

2. Insert the BeOS CD.

3. ADDITIONAL LINKS & INFORMATION: