BeOS was nothing special.
BeOS had features in 1996 which even today none of the major OSs have.
It had all the power of a unix system (protected & virtual memory, POSIX(ish) standard, a decent office suite, decent browser, multiprocessing, heavy multithreading, very good OO API, very easy to use and highly responsive (still the most responsive you'll find today on x86). Oh, and it rarely, if ever crashes.
Today, OS X is the most advanced OS around but even it will have to wait until the next release to get BeOS's search capabilities.
It may be "nothing special" now but it will still take several *years* for any of the OSs serving this community to get even close to the level of functionality in BeOS.
