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 T.B.J. : Welcome Eugenia, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to be with us today for an interview.
Eugenia : Nice to be here :)
T.B.J. : We know you're a long time user of the BeOS, and are still active in the BeOS Community. More on that further down the interview, if you don't mind?
Eugenia : Sure.
T.B.J. : The number one burning question on most people's mind's these days is.... How's the married life? ;-)
Eugenia : Excellent, perfect!! I recommend everyone to get married ASAP... :D
I used to live alone in the UK for many years, far away from my family in Greece, so being with Jean-Baptiste (who is so sweet) is just perfect!
T.B.J. : Well, we were all happy to hear of the great news what, 2 years ago now? Glad to know that you're doing fine in THAT department... ;)
Eugenia : We got married a year ago, but we got to know each other 2 years ago, through BeOS and BeNews. Lots of IRC chats... :)
He was in USA and I was in the UK... A modern love story/fairy tale.. :D
T.B.J. : How long have you used BeOS?
Eugenia : Since March 1999. I found a DemoCD in a UK magazine, and I fell in love with it immediately. Some months later, I purchased R4.5
T.B.J. : What was the thing that made you "fall in love" with BeOS? Was it a specific aspect of the OS, or a number of things?
Eugenia : I liked how "clean" the OS felt when using it. There were no magic tricks I had to learn, as with Linux or UNIX in general. Everything just worked, and if I needed more specific things, like adding applications on startup or installing new libraries, it was easy as cake.
I liked the interface as well. In the beginning I was finding it a bit too "Macintosh" for my own taste, but soon it became apparent that Tracker rocked the world. :D
After I purchased R4.5 and installed BeOS on its own partition, I felt its great speedy user responsiveness first hand too.
T.B.J. : How had your computing experience been up to that point, before using BeOS? Any funny stories you wish to convey about your previous OS experiences, that most certainly show an insight into BeOS in some way?
Eugenia : Well, I used to work for an OS company back in 1995. We created our own operating system, from 100% assembly code. This job truly made me a geek, and had an impact on my general interest in other operating systems
At that point, I had also used Novel, SCO Unix and an old Red Hat version, 5.2 if I remember correctly. And of course, Windows...
Back in 1995, when I got my first PC, a 486 at 80 Mhz, it came with Win3.1.
Back then, I used to live in Greece still, so the OS was localised in Greek.
The OS came configured as 640x480x16 colors (that is 16 colors, not 16-bit colors).
So, I decided to change the resolution to 800x600 at 256 colors. What happened next, was I lost Greek. I was seeing Chinese or something, instead of Greek.
So, what happens is that when you have Win3.1 localised in Greek and you install your own supported driver for your gfx card, you lose Greek. It was a pain... :D
You should re-install Win3.1 and keep the 16 color VGA setting to have Greek.
If you install the driver, you lose Greek for good. :D
T.B.J. : That is really strange... Thankfully that doesn't happen anymore in Windows (to a lesser degree anyhow), and other OS's.
Eugenia : No, not anymore, Win95 fixed these issues.
T.B.J. : Where were you born and raised?
Eugenia : I was born in Athens, Greece, but I was raised in a small village near the Preveza county. The village has about 3,000 people, and it is pretty quiet. I love the place, but I did not have the opportunity to go back for the last 2 years. I hope I can make it this year. :)
T.B.J. : Where do you currently live?
Eugenia : In the Bay Area, San Fransisco, in the heart of Silicon Valley.. :D
T.B.J. : Can you tell us about JBQ, if anything? Even though this interview is about you, I'm sure our readers are also interested in your insights into a former Be Inc. employee... ;)
Eugenia : He is the sweetest person in the whold world. (in my mind :)
He is very logical to everything he does, while I mostly act on my emotions.. :D
He loves programming, and he writes his own OS in his free time. He already has a minimal graphical interface :)
s new job does not give him much free time, but he always finds time to have some game play on his PS2.
And yes, these days, he runs exclusively WindowsXP.
T.B.J. : Nooooooooo... A lot of people are going to be stressed about that... ;-) (hehe)
Eugenia : Probrably. ;) He has not booted into BeOS in months, he does not need to. XP does all he wants to do
T.B.J. : That's ok.. they'll grow up. ;-)
T.B.J. : Where are you currently working these days?
Eugenia : I have not worked for a year now. Since I moved to USA, I haven't had the right to work here, because my VISA in dependant on my husband's.
So, I have all the time I need to port BeOS or AtheOS applications :D
T.B.J. : Are you still using BeOS these days? How much?
Eugenia : Not as much as I want to. I boot to it once or twice a week to be honest. My main operating system now is Windows XP PRO. Two years ago, it was BeOS, but I knew what was coming for BeOS, and I needed something that is fully supported and with a brighter future. So, back to Windows, I guess.
T.B.J. : Let's skip back in time to when you were working with BeNews.com. What was that like? Do you miss those days?
Eugenia : I miss it like hell (excuse my language :)
I remember those days and sometimes I just can't hold myself from getting into tears. :(
It was great, we had so much readership, so much news to report on. (unlike these days..)
We had a lively community, we had more than 20,000 page views per day.
We had a dream and hope.
After the focus shift and some information we had, it was clear that the dream wouldn't last for long.
T.B.J. : Do you still communicate with the old crew at BeNews?
Eugenia : Yes, especially with Oliver Thylmann and Scot Hacker.
Scot does not live far away these days and Oliver is one of my very good online friends. I love them both. :)
T.B.J. : What are your thoughts on the famed "Focus Shift" at Be Inc.?
Eugenia : Well, Shift happens.. :D
I think that the focus shift was a double edged sword.
From one side Be _needed_ this shift for investor/stock purposes, and on the other hand, it was soon very apparent that the IA market was a big bursting buble.
T.B.J. : If you were an animal in the wild, what animal would you choose, and why?
Eugenia : I am definetely a sheep. Not that much of a wild animal, is it? :D
I love sheep, they are so extremely innocent...
Sheeps are cute. Cute and fluffy... :D
T.B.J. : What brought you to OSNews.com?
Eugenia : Let me tell you the whole story..
Back in May 2001, some Be engineers tried to complete what we now call Dano, in their spare time. It was apparent that if that won't be completed until end of June, there won't be any other release. I knew that, so I waited, giving a last hope to the "dream"
But June and gone, July came and gone and then, even the most hard standing lovers of BeOS, we knew it was over.
BeNews was having less than 9,000 page views per day at that point, there were no more news to report on and the community was getting smaller and smaller
I had to move on. I wanted to report on all other OSes, to see what a good alternative might be
So, I typed "osnews.com" on my browser, just to see if the domain was available
It was not. OSNews existed since 1997, but it was not having many hits, neither many updates
I wrote to the editors and asked them to let me take over it
They replied positevely, as David Adams who (still) owns OSNews, had just sold his company to Red Hat, so he had no free time for it
In a single week, August 2001, I learnt PHP and wrote the whole OSNews backend and frontend.
I was working day and night. This got me to the hospital. I was working in front of a monitor doing PHP from 9 AM to 3 AM
In the beginning we had the usual 700 page views per day. Just a few months later, March 2002 and we are now on almost 30,000 page views per day
OSNews is today more successful than BeNews ever was, but I still miss BeNews so much... You never forget the first love, I guess :D
T.B.J. : What are your thoughts on openBeOS?
Eugenia : I wish them good luck. This is a *huge* task, to rewrite a whole OS. In the past, it was an easier task, because the services and applications were not so demanding. These days, with all the internet stuff, browsers, fs, security etc it is just a huge undertaking
I do not expect them to have a full blown OS for at least 4-5 years from now, I am just being realistic. But I truly wish them good luck and I hope they will make it
They are still on baby steps, there is a LOT to be done.
It is just too much... It is not that is just difficult, it is also that the quantity of what it has to be done, is too overwhelming
T.B.J. : Getting back to Be Inc. for a moment... In your mind, what is the number one factor that caused their demise?
Eugenia : Bad decisions (business-wise and OS-wise), and Microsoft.
T.B.J. : Would you care to elaborate on your reasons?
Eugenia : Bad decisions: a) business wise: They kept changing focus and while the IA was a lose game, they gave PE for free, instead of giving a 30 days trial and then ask for purchase the PRO version. That killed both Be and the distributors. And if the distributors had no interest to sell it anymore or advertise it, Be wouldn't care less. And the whole thing was a bad cycle...
b) OS-wise: Be did some bad decisions on the OS itself. Things like extreme multithreading has made programming for BeOS, extremely difficult.
Not many Linux or other programmers wanted to develop for BeOS, as not only the multithreading was an issue for many developers, but the debugging and developing tools were already dated
More over, the biggest complain I have about Be and BeOS, was because they did not want to enter the application development in parallel to OS development, so they won't clash with the third party developers like Gobe.
That created second rated applications (or no applications at all), and it gave an overall "no applications for BeOS" feeling to windows users who wanted to try the OS
Even Apple gets it right and develops lots of non-OS software, like office suites, movie and music tools etc
As for the third point, Microsoft, it is already known, I am reffering in Scot Hacker's "He who controls the bootloader" article at Byte
T.B.J. : In these changing times, what do you see as the next great market opportunity?
Eugenia : AI.
I believe that the OS doors are closed for now.
Microsoft will not leave anyone take a significant marketshare off Windows.
It won't happen, no matter if we like BeOS or Mac or Linux.
The next big revolution is AI. No one has done it yet, therefore the first who will be able to have even a preliminary version working along wiht your computer, he is the next billionair
T.B.J. : Can you elaborate on why AI will be so important?
Eugenia : I have written an editorial about that on BeNews, a year ago, I explain everything there, let me get the URKL: http://web.archive.org/web/0736/www.benews.com/story/3803
T.B.J. : Can you tell us about your own coding experience(s), and about why you've ported more than 80 applications to BeOS?
Eugenia : Well, I wanted to support the OS of my choice, to enrich it with more apps.
Eugenia : Some times the porting would drag me up to 4 AM in the morning, but it was fun.
Eugenia : These days I do not do much development anymore, OSNews keeps me quite busy. But I want to learn more about C#. Not necessarily under .NET, but maybe under Linux too. C# sounds like an interesting language (development-wise speaking)
T.B.J. : How long have you been coding?
Eugenia : Since 1993, when I started at college. I started with Turbo Pascal back in those days, but I soon got over C. Then, it was the internet craze, so I got all over ASP, and these days I mostly maintain OSNews doing some PHP. Oh, oh, I like Python too! :)
T.B.J. : Have you ever considered dropping OSNews, and becoming a full time coder?
Eugenia : Naah.. OSNews is fun, it is nice "meeting" more people online and talk about things.
Eugenia : I would still do some development anyway, probably with C# this time.
Eugenia : I am thinking of learning more Qt as well, under Linux.
T.B.J. : What is your favorite flavour of Linux, and why?
Eugenia : Gentoo.
Eugenia : Gentoo is mostly for coders, it is not an extremely user friendly distro
Eugenia : but it is really fast and its Portage, its BSD-like package application, rocks
T.B.J. : What do you want to do with the rest of your life?
Eugenia : Children.
Eugenia : My mind is locked on having some children these days, this is the only thing I want to succeed anymore. And thinking about it, having a happy and healthy family it is all that matters to me.
T.B.J. : Any last, final comments you wish to share with TBJ readers?
Eugenia : Get into programming, learn C/C++ and help OpenBeOS. Keep the dream alive! Never forget!
Eugenia : Oh, and be good to your fellow people.
T.B.J. : Thank you for your time, Eugenia... It's been a real pleasure.
Eugenia : Thank you too!
Eugenis is the leading editor at OSNews.com, and a long time BeOS user in the BeOS Community. She can be reached via or her website, and sometimes on BeShare.
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