> To me it looked like Apple would scrap OS 9 for BeOS, but after Steve Jobs came back it was forgotten.
Erm... Jobs came back because the BeOS deal didn't go through. That was the point: Apple could go on their own, with Be or with NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP was Jobs's company.
> Is it UNIX based?
No, though it has a POSIX compatibility layer (and therefore access to BSD CLI utils)
> Has it gone anywhere since?
Be, Inc was sold to Palm for a penny in 2001 and BeOS was killed. Fans are writing an OpenSource BeOS (with no IP-relations to the original one, but goals of being able to run BeOS binaries unmodified for instance) with Haiku: http://haiku-os.org/
Erm... Jobs came back because the BeOS deal didn't go through. That was the point: Apple could go on their own, with Be or with NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP was Jobs's company.
> Is it UNIX based?
No, though it has a POSIX compatibility layer (and therefore access to BSD CLI utils)
> Has it gone anywhere since?
Be, Inc was sold to Palm for a penny in 2001 and BeOS was killed. Fans are writing an OpenSource BeOS (with no IP-relations to the original one, but goals of being able to run BeOS binaries unmodified for instance) with Haiku: http://haiku-os.org/