Submitted by Late 2000. There is a grey and blue tower PC on my dorm-room desk like nothing anybody who walks into the room has ever seen. The Be logo on the front, a 3.5″ floppy peeking out the bottom of the drive bays, and the vertical grille that hides two columns of green LEDs (blinkenlights) dancing with the CPU load. This was a dual-PowerPC workstation running an operating system you didn’t see in the wild. I was studying computer science at the time and this was a fun piece of hardware.
↫ J.D. Hodges
As a BeOS user in and around 2001 or so, the BeBox was the holy grail of the little community I was a part of. There were some people here and there in online circles who had one, but they were rare even when new, and by 2001, they had become rarer still. This rarity made them mysterious and exciting from almost from the day they were launched, like a small volume halo car few people will ever get to see, let alone experience, first-hand.
It’s 2026 now, and more and more of the small number of BeBoxen made must be succumbing to degradation and hardware failures. I hope everyone who has one takes good care of them, because these are some of the rarest, most coveted computers of all time. I’ve still never seen one, and here in Arctic Europe I most likely never will. Still, I remain hopeful.
One day.
To this day I regret selling my dual CPU BeBox. I picked it up for a good price in 2000, but college tuition came due and I sold it 6 months later. What a beautiful and unique machine, even if PowerPC BeOS software was rare even then.
There’s one on display in Europe (and free to use and try) at the Home Computer Museum in Helmond, The Netherlands. Super chill place, worth a visit!
I bought and still have the boxes (and disks, etc) for BeOS 4.5 and 5.0 but I never could “afford” a BeBox. Okay, “technically” I could afford one but I was married and we had bigger priorities which I was in agreement with (as compared to husbands that agree because they are worried that their wife will cut off sex which was not the case for me).
Yes, I wanted a BeBox. I watched the video the Be PR person introducing multiple people including Jean-Louis Gassée who was THE person that caused so many sales of Apple products in Europe as the first Apple Europe head of sales. He was so great at sales that Apple hired him for Apple USA. But he disagreed with Apple U.S. so he left with a buyout and he was the money behind Be Inc. or the company might never have been formed.
I read his articles from the 1990s until he retired from writing. He writes for Linked-In now but they are a Microsoft company and I don’t consume Microsoft products or else I would read everything that he writes.
I was following Haiku (open source BeOS but all the code was new from the ground up in Haiku with no Be Inc code in it as far as I know. But now they are starting to implement AI into Haiku and I’m trying to decide if I want to keep following it or not. Personally I wished they had a forked version of Haiku so that you could choose whether or not you wanted AI in your version of not.
Yes, I’m old school. I was a programmer for 40 years and I LOVED proving people wrong when they said that X, Y or Z couldn’t be done. Like making a version of Windows 3.1 for mainframes which you TOTALLY could do if you were lucky enough to have a graphics terminal which only a small percentage of people had. But if you did, you could write something that looked and functioned like Windows 3.1 because I did it. No I didn’t have ALL of it because it takes tens of thousands of people to write the WHOLE OS and apps to run on it. But I did enough that people had to admit that it could be done. The only thing that CAN’T be done is what people are too lazy to write. But now you can be lazy and have AI write it. I’m fine if you are for it. Why can’t everyone be fine if I want an OS that does NOT have it?
But this is about BeBoxes and I wish I had one. But I never wanted to work for a slimy company like Microsoft or Facebook or Google and I’m too much of a loaner to run a software company or any kind of company.
Unless something has changed in the past week the exact opposite is true, they forbid “AI” generated submissions to the project. There is a PPC fork of Haiku called Tabby, being developed by Sean Malseed, aka “Action Retro” on Youtube, and he is almost exclusively using LLMs to code it, but it is not endorsed by the Haiku devs at all and nothing from it is merged back into Haiku. There are a few folks in the Haiku forums pushing hard for the project to adopt LLM use but the project devs are not having any of it and have asked those community members to stop trying to change the devs’ minds on it.
Yeah, I have no idea what he’s talking about either, that’s a major “citation needed” as far as the core project is concerned.
Still have mine in the closet somewhere… need to bring it to the Errors club and have it brought back to life one of these days 😛
Although the BeBox was and still is a very nice piece of hardware, I ran BeOS for much longer on a dual Celeron (Abit BP6?) motherboard.
Wow. BeOS. There was two ways to have SMP thoses days: the BeBox, and one dual CPU motherboard (abit?).
I really liked BeOS, it has been killed by the lack of apps. Porting an opensource code was difficult because many apps relied on mmap() call that were missing.
I created my own sound driver for the maxisound64 under BeOS, I received some help from Be (JB Queru I think), and even other sound cards from 2 asian manufacturers – build on the same Dream 9407 chip – but without any documentation…
doubleUb,
Indeed, the lack of software ecosystem has killed many a good OS.
In terms of lacking mmap, do you have an example we can look at?
I would think this difficulty depends on whether the application actually needs mmap functionality directly or happens to use it indirectly via the loader/runtime. If you strace an average program, you’ll see mmap calls to map in shared libraries and to by the runtime to implement “malloc” memory allocation. However I’d expect most software to work with a different runtime that doesn’t require mmap. Then again, I appreciate how there are many barriers to porting software. Typically the devs just aren’t interested in supporting other platforms 🙁
I used to fiddle with my own sound drivers too. I enjoyed working with low level software. Over time I stopped working with low level code though. Most employers aren’t interested in paying for that sort of work, they expect everything to work out of the box and as a developer I’ve needed to evolve my skills to the work that’s available – mostly boring business stuff.