"Compared to the Amiga, BeOS was very modern. For example it used 32-bit colour on the desktop while my Amiga was using 4-bit, 16 colour palette mode."

Along with Ingo Weinhold, who is also a major Haiku contributor, he travelled to the CeBIT trade show to see BeOS in action. They both came away convinced of the platform. Weinhold bought a PowerPC-based Mac clone -- BeOS was already running on PowerPC at that point -- while Aßmus purchased an x86 PC after a BeOS rep said that the OS was being ported to the architecture. "I had to wait for another year, I believe, but when BeOS R3 was released, I immediately bought and installed it," he says.

Aßmus and Weinhold both began developing applications for BeOS (Aßmus was largely responsible for WonderBrush, a graphics program for BeOS).

"When Be Inc went out of business in 2001, we already had quite some investment into the platform. And the alternatives at the time where not appealing to us."

Hence the appeal of Haiku.