“After feverishly working throughout 1995, it was finally decided that the results of 5 years of low profile work were ready for a public launch. When one considers that little over a year earlier, Be’s entire hardware platform had been made redundant by the demise of the AT&T Hobbit processors, this was a remarkable achievement.” Ten years ago, the legendary BeBox computer was introduced by Be,Inc at Agenda ’95. Joseph Palmer has put up a gallery of photos of the event.
The link “gallery of photos” contains the URL twice.
The link “gallery of photos” contains the URL twice.
Thanks for letting me know, my keyboard rate is set too high on Zeta :/.
Fixed.
http://www.josephpalmer.com/gallery/Be/Page_i.html
Ahh, these were good times. IMHO the current stucked IT-world badly needs a kick in the face – comparable with the upcoming BeOS back in the day.
Makes me wish I was there. The BeBox was so cool. Wish I had one.
Makes me wish I was there. The BeBox was so cool. Wish I had one.
Same here. The picture gallery makes me nostalgic for something I completely missed.
I was a teen cursing at Windows 95 back then. Still am btw.
I recall Be’s first appearance at MWSF (’95 or 96?). I got their pocket protector and wound up signing up as a developer. It was a made-to-order platform for the high end 3D graphics project I was on then: Mac multithreading just wasn’t there yet and Windows didn’t have the horsepower, stability, or decent development tools (still waiting for the last 2.)
I got a shiny new BeBox (never got the plastic front cover, though) and played with it when I could. I always felt bad that I never had time to really get going; of course, I also missed the beating that the more Be-active guys got later on. I visit it occasionally, and one of these days I’ll a hard drive and a bottle of Jack and fire ‘er up one more time.
I understand Apple’s reasons for going w/ Next instead of Be (the *nix buzzword as well as cost and maturity), but Be sure had a more exciting product.
It was 96. Why do you list price as a reason to go with the A plan (Next) instead of the Be plan?
Why do you list price as a reason to go with the A plan (Next) instead of the Be plan?
As reported at the time, Gassee wanted more for Be than Apple was willing to pay, given Be’s maturity as a platform. Next was seen as worth (a lot) more, given that it had been around longer, had more software available, and had a fair size installed base.
If Be had started (publicly) when Next did, they would have had more time in a much less difficult environment, and maybe they’d have pulled it off, or had the reputation to get their price. Next was always crippled by its extreme pricing, which prevented much of a community from starting outside a few colleges; their software was good enough (at the time, with very little competition) to sell & maintain a foothold after their boxes died, unlike Be.
Let’s see if that was enough for a flaming by the Cocoa-philes!
🙂 I was around Be at the time, after having spend some time around Nextbefore, so I qualify for both sides:-)
Be careful with what you read about the price Be was supposedly asking for. There’s never been any communication on this topic neither from Apple nor from Be.
Oh man. These pictures bring back the excitement of finding something new and good.
Maybe the BeBox/BeOs arrived at a wrong time. It was too late to be a proprietary OS and to early to embrace the “opensource movement”. Who knows, what could have been happened if…
second hand, but it’s way too expensive now. I just can’t afford it.
As far as expandability, nothing touched – and still doesn’t – be BeBox.
Now, what about the Hobbit-based BeBox? I understand it looked pretty much like the PPC BeBox.
I remember the BeBox for sale in an airline catalog I saw on a United flight. I also remember thinking “that’s one expensive computer”. But it served as my introduction to BeOS and I followed it from there. When the x86 version came out I was amazed at its speed (this was on a 300MHz AMD K6-2). Lack of applications was the only thing that held me back from using it full time. When they shifted to “‘net appliances” the writing was on the wall for its doom and I later discovered Slackware and haven’t looked back since.
http://www.bebox.nu/images.php?s=images/ppcbebox
Nice OS but the box didn’t appear to be anything special.
http://www.bebox.nu/images.php?s=images/hobbit
Even the Hobbit appeared to be more of the same.
I still have my BeBox (Dual 133) though it has been shelved. It is a bit too loud for my likes for desktop use (i tried to fit a fan regulator, but that made the CPUs overheat; a bit of “modern” cooling tech would likely easily do it).
It’s a bit sad that it didn’t catch on, but JLG has too good of a hand to run companies into the ground I guess. And people weren’t ready for it, sticking to what they knew or got to know by seriously being hyped.
Interestingly, these days, “desktop search” is all the buzz. Everyone seems to think “who dominates desktop search will be the next Microsoft”.
If you look here
http://www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/beware/Utilities/B-Twin….
you will see that I wrote a desktop searching application for the BeBox way back then. It didn’t come with proper data filters, and it also lacked any decent compression for the indici, but it was a perfectly well working showcase.
I got _ZERO_ feedback on it. Right that. ZERO. Not even an e-mail. Nothing. For the other Be-ware I wrote, at least the occasional child (you know the sort that posts “linux is not ready for the desktop” around here these days) would chime in with “plz make $APP work on my PC with penitum CPu and also u must make it impr0t MSword filez”. But “desktop search” was over their heads back then, as was the overall concept.
I believe if they had managed to maintain the hype for another year or two, it might have caught on. But when the venture vultures demand ROI _now_, you’re likely SOL.
Rich
Regardless of how useful your search engine is/was then/now, it is vital to keep in mind that back then, most people didn’t have nearly enough data to worry about such things: it was simple enough to keep track of what they had using BFS indices and decent folder organization, whereas now, hard drives store many times as much data on them as they did then, by as much or more of 10 times the capacity.
Basically, you provided an additional level of completeness for searching at a time when the amount of data people had to search didn’t warrant the additional complexity to have it indexed and searchable with that tool, so people logically said, “Nah, indexes already provide me with enough ease of organization, why add another bit of complexity?” to something that already worked well enough for them at that time. So, the reality is you were thinking too far in the future for the present needs, and by the time people had a real use for that additional power (at the price of slightly more complexity) your solution was completely forgotten about, because nobody needed it then.
Perhaps you should submit your search/index solution to the Haiku project, since such search technology is needed now.
Regardless of how useful your search engine is/was then/now, it is vital to keep in mind that back then, most people didn’t have nearly enough data to worry about such things.
They still don’t, for the most part.
[/i]
Basically, you provided an additional level of completeness for searching at a time when the amount of data people had to search didn’t warrant the additional complexity to have it indexed and searchable with that tool, so people logically said, “Nah, indexes already provide me with enough ease of organization, why add another bit of complexity?” to something that already worked well enough for them at that time. So, the reality is you were thinking too far in the future for the present needs, and by the time people had a real use for that additional power (at the price of slightly more complexity) your solution was completely forgotten about, because nobody needed it then.
[/i]
Except for the fact that it doesn’t add /any/ complexity, since you’re not forced to use it. It adds another dimension to the filesystem, and allows for a whole host of goodies.
Searching is overrated. It’s too incomprehensible to replace a hierarchy, and it’s needed so rarely that it doesn’t even have to be quick.
-bytecoder
-bytecoder
> Perhaps you should submit your search/index solution to the Haiku project, since such search technology is needed now.
I’d recommend they get a copy of “Managing Gigabytes”. I came across it _after_I did the hacking… Provides a good coverage of all the full-text search logic, including efficient storage.
I don’t really feel like putting my efforts into such a fringe platform (be it Haiku, Zeta or whatever) these days unless someone waves wads of green up front. Back then, Apple was struggling with Copland, and along came Be with the “all new and great” promises, and for the larger technical part they even kept them. So I got the Box to test the waters and wrote a bit of code to see if it leads to something. It did not. And Be kept “refocusing” faster than anyone could code anyway.
I still do miss: 1.) the lovely Frog Design box, 2.) four seconds boot (eat that SysV!) 3.) the Application server design (or parts thereof) that I still consider to be among the finest GUI platform designs.
at least the occasional child (you know the sort that posts “linux is not ready for the desktop” around here these days)
Oh yeah. As opposed to the other kiddies (you know the sort that posts “linux is l337 and ready for the desktop” around here these days).
No offence, but can anyone see future potential for BE as operating system?
They have done great job in past. and that’s all.
Ooohhh… I can see the potential. But that’s probably because BeOS was designed pretty much like I believed a system was meant to be designed like.
But okay… I’m a geek (or so I’m told by my teachers in Computer Science).
Maybe Yellowtab should contact some company like Microtel to see about getting Zeta pre-installed on some of their pcs.
Maybe Yellowtab should contact some company like Microtel to see about getting Zeta pre-installed on some of their pcs.
Zeta was already talking with a producer of integrated mini PCs to sell Zeta+box for about $799 (IIRC). Forgot the name of the other company.
I built an AMD K6-2 300mhz system that I ran BeOS on for some time, and it was nice.
Eventually, I got a 550mhz processor for it, and it REALLY kicked butt.
I also ran BeOS on my PowerCenter 132 on it’s own 3gb HDD. With the 604e 200mhz upgrade in there, it worked nice too.
I wanted to build a Dual Celeron 500 box for BeOS, but never got around to it.
I keep hoping to snag a BeBox of any type at an affordable price. But, so far… they’ve all sold at more than I can afford right now.
I NEVER understood why Be stopped making them.
I wish someone would get the board layout and do another run of boards.
I’d bet there are enough people who’d buy one or more to make it worthwhile…
They couldn’t sell them? Nobody wanted them?
A lot of this stuff seems to be more popular after it fails than it was before, but really, it’s only a few thousand people who care enough to actually put money on the line.
That’s why these things die out.
I bought all the releases that would run on my Macs. When Apple decided to stop supporting them, I stopped.
I also bought all of (yeah, ALL) of the software produced for it. Even if you could get the OS installed, and that’s a tale in itself, a lot of the software simply didn’t work. I still have a number of packages that are unopened.
I just keep all of the stuff for historical reasons, like my old computers. My daughter wants it.
Be, Inc. Launches New BeBox
In the most f-d up story since BeDoper stopped using gratuitous profanity, a smegging bollockspile of a company named Be has launched a Bebox. It’s some sort of bloody ISP/hardware combo thingy.
I’m not too clear on the details, but I want this thing put down like a rabid pitbull.
http://money.guardian.co.uk/internetcosts/story/0,12769,1578645,00….
http://www.bedoper.com/bedoper/2005/35.htm
Alas, the new Be in England has the right to call their boxes ‘Be Box’, since BeBox is no longer a maintained trademark in the US, and it was never granted in the EU.
Could do stuff with video and audio on a K6 400 you still have problems trying to get Windows to do on current hardware.
Now that was a pleasent OS experience.
Believers often like to mention how Be’s media handling was so great, yet when you ask for a real example it’s always “Well, it could um, play dozens of movies on the sides of a spinning cube”, which is a half-remembered version of Be’s cheesiest demo, 3 low res animations playing at once, like, well, any decent OS on similar hardware, plus a simple software-only 3D rendering framework.
Occasionally the mis-remembered demo is Benoit’s mix, a dumbed down version of something other platforms had been doing for years too – 3D visualisation of a sound field. Except unlike the real thing, Benoit’s little BeOS demo doens’t actually support 3D sound, not even multi-channel, it’s all glitz and no results.
Actually if I were to pick one thing that typifies BeOS, it would be the native web browser. Rather than fix the security bugs, rather than improve the rendering, rather than add much-wanted features, Be Inc’s browser added funny Haiku error messages. That’s the BeOS message “Don’t worry about quality, look at the silly free gifts!”
Believers often like to mention how Be’s media handling was so great, yet when you ask for a real example it’s always “Well, it could um, play dozens of movies on the sides of a spinning cube”, which is a half-remembered version of Be’s cheesiest demo, 3 low res animations playing at once, like, well, any decent OS on similar hardware, plus a simple software-only 3D rendering framework.
Uh huh… speaking of half-remembered, it was actually 6 quicktime movies that were mapped (in realtime) to the surfaces of a spinning cube.
And if you truly think that’s all there is to BeOS’s media handling abilities, I recommend reading a bit about it, or perhaps using it once or twice.
I still remember the applause at a developer show in Boston (’97)… when JLG showed the CPU about dialog which demstrated the white box was a dual PII.
Basically, same as NeXT a few years earlier… they realised they couldn’t make $$$ selling hardware.
🙂
I remember running DR8 on my powermac 7600 and coding, “Poker” in a couple of evenings.
Wish it would have had legs… 🙁
– Joel A.
I NEVER understood why Be stopped making them.
Well, developing and manufacturing your own board and computer is a pretty expensive proposition. Be got a lot more milage from people running BeOS on Intel or MacOS out of interest in general, however the BeBox served its purpose well as a DevKit environment for developers to get on board BeOS first (and had cash to plunk down on buying one) to try and get critical mass.
The average person isn’t that keen on spending a lot of money on a new OS and new computer that runs it unless they have very specific reasons to do so, so there’s big advantages in letting people run your OS/apps on standardised hardware.
I’d bet there are enough people who’d buy one or more to make it worthwhile…
Well, if someone can cost up the specs maybe Joe Palmer can divulge the details and costings, it wouldn’t be bad to get a NuBeBox at some point with PCI-E and G3/G4’s or Pentium Mobile chips in it. The OS would take some work to make it run however, or Zeta could be ported.
Hey PC!! How are ya! Long time no talk! (I’m Al Hartman from the vMac list…)
I’m not talking about a redesigned unit.
I’d be 100% ok with a run of the last Revision BeBox Board AS-IS. Though maybe someone could figure out how to put a faster PPC on them…
And as for the BeBox. The money had been spent. The hardware was designed and working. The OS had been coded. The board was produced.
All Be had to do was to keep making them.
I wanted to buy one, but before I could… They stopped making them. And believe me, I was bummed out big-time by that.
I hope to own one someday…
If someone can make a Replica Apple I, and sell enough of them to make it worthwhile, I’m sure someone could make a replica BeBox.
No need to recode the OS. BeOS already exists and will run fine on it.
And the BeBox folk have ported other Os’es to it as well.
We should celebrate its death as well.
They don’t come as duals yet, but the PowerPC-based Pegasos might be a good idea. While I’ve been a sceptic since the OpenBSD and MorphOS developer relations disasters on the part of Genesi, (I even sold my peggy), I must admitt they have shown considerable staying power, and they have been shipping their 2’nd generation Pegasos with G3 and G4 processors for quite some time, in (some, but how much?) collaboration with IBM, Freescale/Motorola and Terra Soft. Given how hard it is being a hardware manufacturer perhaps we should cut them some slack. I don’t know.
It seems they are working on some very nice products. Tiny G4 boards, duals and 970-based boards are rumoured. I haven’t heard any rumours on a Cell-based product, but that would definitely rock. I think Genesi/B-Plan are the right people to make this and market it to the common man, as the other industry players are more into embedded, industrial applications, or data center blade servers.
http://www.pegasosppc.com/
Upcoming mini-itx?
http://www.pegasosppc.com/gallery.php?id=128
Nice production video
http://www.bplan-gmbh.de/gfx/movie/h2btm.mpg
It would certainly be good if Zeta or Haiku would support the Pegasos as a platform for their respective OS’es.
From what I understand, AROS has a Pegasos II Board and is bringing AROS to it.
And I think that a Haiku developer has one as well.
I’d love to get one of those, but my finances right now don’t allow it.
If I come into some money, I’d like to add a BeBox, a Pegasos and an AmigaONE to my stable of systems.
Haiku coder Axel Dörfler has a Pegasos II, AFAIK, but the port to PowerPC has to wait. First things first.
A PPC port would be very low priority given the PC version being so unfinished.
Any new dual core PC should be fine. So long as it is not a PIII, darn that broken kernel.
(In fact better ask someone who has Zeta running and make sure that the hardware is fully supported.)
Save a few Gb of the 200GB disk for a copy of Zeta, the development tools, and every single application ever developed for BEOS plus swap space.
Cut a 20Gb partition for FAT32 so you can copy media files around between Windows and Zeta.
Leave most of the room free so you can shoe horn Vista and office 12 into the other 130GB..
Better get 1Gb of ram for Windows Vista, on Zeta it will say 23% used. As Zeta is a memory Hog (in the Beos world anyway.)
When you get tired of waiting for Windows or Linux, or get sick of their UI lock ups, run Zeta for a while and enjoy what *should* have been.
An NVIDIA card would be a good idea, some day soon the GL teapot will be accelerated..
One problem the Zeta Window borders will probably never be see through.
Well… I’m not interested in paying over $100US for Zeta.
If it were a reasonable price (like BeOS itself was..), like $49.95 + S/H. I would have ordered one a LONG time ago.
I paid the $50 pre-order fee for AmigaOS 4, even though I don’t have an AmigaONE, and have donated similar amounts over time to the AROS and ReactOS projects.
I just don’t want to pay MORE than MacOS X and Windows XP for an OS that is much more unfinished, and not as ready for “prime time”.
I think the YT people are unrealitic in their pricing structure.
They’d sell a LOT More copies if it was cheaper.
I can easily pirate it off Bittorrent or one of those sites. So far, I’ve resisted the temptation to do it.
My BeOS 5.03 Box runs great, and I can get most of what Zeta adds from BeBits.
I’d love to play with Zeta, but $100+ is just too much for playing…
I’m already playing with the Windows Vista Beta (from work which is an MSDN Subscriber) for free, and learning lots about the next version of Windows.
I’m already using MacOS X Tiger that came as an inexpensive upgrade for my Mac Mini.
Zeta is just being silly with their pricing structure, and will prices themselves out of customers and into being heavily pirated.
While running on a AMD K6-2 450 with 128 M RAM was quite snappy with BeOS Max PE 5.03, I experienced SEVERAL complete freezes using it (with different applications being the guilty ones each time). The boot time was great, no doubt. But, Slackware was/is a lot more stable than BeOS on the same machine, and quite snappy too (IceWM+Rox).