japan

Back in the 90s, BeOS had many very faithful followers in Japan, both end users and developers. You can still see on the web photos of how people lined up late at night to get their hands on BeOS 4.5J released by PlatHome, the BeOS distributor in Japan (more pics here). Japanese developers also contributed a good amount of software for BeOS back in those days, some of which has made it into the Haiku code base (ie., the Canna Japanese input method, the MuTerm terminal on which the Haiku terminal is based, etc.). The Konatsu font used in Haiku to display Japanese is also an original creation by Masuda Mitiya, originally designed specifically for BeOS. Sadly but understandably, not many of these former BeOS fans remain active today; in fact, only very very few.

I was one of the founding members of the Japan BeOS Network user group (JPBE.net) in Japan, which we created in 2003 mainly in response to the appearance of ZETA. Back in those days, when Haiku was still at a too early stage to have any appeal, ZETA gave the JPBE.net members hope that BeOS could survive and even evolve. As time went by, our hope gradually changed into to the realization that ZETA was not what we thought it would be, and that realization eventually changed into the final disapointment brought by the sad unraveling of ZETA and yellowTAB. The end was particularly nasty in Japan, where the ZETA distributor sold the shipped product but never had the decency to pay royalties to yellowTAB. Not that this was the direct and only cause of yellowTAB's demise, but in the eyes of Japanese users, this did add a large dose of extra drama to how ZETA went down in history, making the disapointment even greater. The "ok, I've had enough; I am moving on" feeling was quite prevalent.

Demo machine at KOF Haiku boothNot surprisingly, it took me much longer than originally planned to find the time to write about the second day at the Kansai Open Source Forum conference (KOF). But no worries: memories are still quite fresh, as it's usually the case when things go well and you have fun. The second KOF day started earlier, especially for me. The exhibits were scheduled to open at 10:00AM, so with Momoziro we decided to meet at the hotel lobby at around 9:00AM. But I was up way before that, at around 5:30AM (compliments of my very jet-lagged old body). So I sat in front of my laptop to write some emails and then went through my Haiku presentation slides again, making little changes here and there, changing the order of a few slides and even adding a couple of slides based on some of the questions that I had received during the first day at KOF.