In October 1995, Be, Inc. unveiled its first (and last) computer, the BeBox.
Be was founded in 1990 by Jean-Louis Gassé, former manager of the French Apple subsidiary.
For almost 5 years, 12 engineers from Apple, NeXT and Sun designed the BeBox and its operating system, BeOs. The total design cost was about US$9 million.
BeBox hadware was based on a dual PowerPC 603 C.P.U. running at 66 MHz (later 133 MHz). The motherboard was not really innovative but featured a large range of Input/Output ports, including IDE and SCSI HDD interfaces, standard PC card slots, MIDI, audio, infrared ports plus a special GeekPort for hardware experiments.
The Be Operating System was also developed from the ground up. It aimed to be an alternative to the "Heavy weight" Windows and Mac OS's, which were handicaped by backward compatibility hardware and software issues.
BeOs was a clear and clean multi-processor (up to 8), multi-threading, multi-tasking, GUI-based operating system, optimized for digital media management.
The first BeBox machines were mainly intended for use by software developers, BeOs was delivered with Metrowerks CodeWarrior and C++ languages.
In spite of its numerous advanced features, the BeBox never met the success expected by its designers, mainly because it was compatible with nothing else in the computing industry. Less than 2000 machines were delivered between October 1995 and January 1997, when production ceased.
In 1996, BeOs was ported to Apple PowerPC machines but Apple eventually preferred the NeXT basis for its future Mac OS X. Two years later, BeOs ran on Intel machines.
Because of the small size of the company and the competition from much larger competitors, the Be adventure finally ended on Novembre 2001 when the company sold all of its intellectual property and technology assets to Palm. Just before this happened, J.L. Gassé offered for free the lastest version of his OS (R5) to Intel PC users.
Nowadays, Although marginal, BeOs is still alive, and new releases and updates are regularly announced by the BeOs community.
We need more info about this computer ! If you designed, used, or have more info about this system,
please send us pictures or anything you might find useful.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
It''s a SIEMENS NIXDORF SCENIC Pro M6 i think and it works ,don''t need it and i want to sell it
Sunday 6th May 2018
Vojin Zivadinovic (Serbia)
I have a PC that is very old and i want determine it''s value and probably sell it,if you can help me contact me on my e-mail vojinzivadinovic@yahoo.com
Sunday 6th May 2018
Vojin Zivadinovic (Serbia)
Paul Taylor, can i purchase it?
Thursday 15th March 2018
Sam Taber
NAME
BeBox
MANUFACTURER
Be
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
October 1995
END OF PRODUCTION
1997
KEYBOARD
Standard PC-AT
CPU
Two RISC-based PowerPC 603 or 603e
SPEED
66 or 133 MHz
RAM
Up to 256 MB (up to 8 72-pin SIMM modules)
ROM
Unknown
TEXT MODES
80 columns x 25 lines
GRAPHIC MODES
640x480 to 1600x1200
COLORS
256 to 16.7 million
SOUND
16-bit stereo sound system - Dual MIDI channels
SIZE / WEIGHT
21 (W) x 39.8 (H) x 46.1 (D) cm
I/O PORTS
4xserial, Parallel, 3xInfrared, SCSI II, 2xjoystick, 2xMidi, GeekPort
