I've been part of the BeOS community since 1998 and I have no idea what he's talking about. Other than R5 Personal Edition, x86 BeOS was never free.
Be failed because it existed in the times of Microsoft dominance, Apple didn't buy it, and it had some major technical deficiencies (many of which have been addressed in Haiku).
That document mentions that R5 Personal Edition had a disk partition size of 512MB. That's disk, not RAM.
R5 PE had that partition size because it installed to a 512MB file within your Windows partition, then booted from that file. Personal Edition was meant to give a way to try BeOS without having to have a second drive or do any partitioning. Once booted into it, you could just launch the Installer app and install to any size partition you pleased.
Be was essentially dead decently before R5 was released, so I disagree with the author's conclusion.
You are right, its been a while and my memory is hazy. It's not that I cant tell them apart, it's more that I read it a couple years ago and it just doesnt come up and I apparently can't be fucked to look up the docs.
Be failed because it existed in the times of Microsoft dominance, Apple didn't buy it, and it had some major technical deficiencies (many of which have been addressed in Haiku).