uccwiki

BeBox (n; plural BeBoxen)
    A Box manufatured by the company Be Inc.

UCC has two BeBoxen, a revision 6 production model called magenta and a pre-release rev 5 prototype model which has no name (referred to as PPC95111000 through this article) which has never had a front bezel. Magenta is believed to be stored in the clubroom somewhere, while PPC95111000 is currently with AlexDawson for advanced hardware diagnostics and repairs.

Be Inc. was started in 1990 by Jean Louis Gasse, an early Apple pioneer. The company became defunct in 2001. For more information about the company, please see Be Inc. (Wikipedia). As of 2018, they are the last company to attempt to enter the home PC market with their own hardware and OS, and are considered an example not to follow.

These machines utilise dual PowerPPC 603 CPUs and were considered far ahead of their time. Be Inc developed their own operating system, intially only for PowerPC but was later ported to other platforms, which was called BeOS.

BeBox-HWBlockDiagW.gif 

The big problem they had was that they irritated their developers due to the brittle base class problem. They broke ABI a lot – even if your program would compile without changes, it still needed recompilation and redistribution to users. Pre-ubiquitous-fast-internet connections, that was ridiculously impractical.
- Grahame Bowland, 1/04/2012

[...] Those guys were way ahead of their time. Database-based filesystems with indexing and
searching; ubiquitous threading and multi-processor support; metadata mania; the whole works.
It's only in the last few years that we've started to get the sorts of functionality they had
back then.
- Daniel Axtens, 31/03/2012

General BeBox Software Notes

General BeBox Hardware Notes

BeBox hardware is generally divided up into "Revisions" based on the motherboard version. On inspection of remaining examples, there was some "agile" product development going on, with iterative changes based on development progress. Particularly, it seems some Rev 6 boards are paired with full cases with blinkenlights, while others are not. Only about 1800 BeBox units were ever sold, including prototypes.

Rev ??

Rev 3

Rev 5

Rev 6

Rev 8

Rev ??

Notes and resources

UCC BeBoxes

Pre-UCC history

The two BeBoxen were donated sometime between 1995 and 1999 by past UCC member Peter N. Lewis on behalf of his company, Stairways Software. At the time, he was interested in trying the Be in addition to his existing MacOS development work. As of 2018, he has given permission for UCC to de-acession them.

The rev 5 prototype BeBox has the lowest serial number known (PPC95111000) according to a list of known BeBoxen (link not working as of 2018). If UCC wishes to divest this system in the future, it would be advised to contact the Computer History Museum in Sunnyvale CA for potential donation.

Only a small number of prototype BeBoxen were ever produced, handmade by Be Inc. employees and delivered to developers in 1995. They bear a label stating the following: 

Attention! This device has not been approved by the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be offered for sale or lease, or sold until the approval of the FCC has been obtained.

Magenta is one of the production units that were available to consumers after 1996. The machines are able to perform basic networking functions and authentication over LDAP. Due to the fact that BeOS failed to become widely used, there is very little software available that runs on it. At some point, there was a BeOS installer CD in the clubroom.

PPC95111000

Work Performed so far is as follows:

On Visual inspection, some of the Programmable Array Logic chips exhibit slight corrosion.

PPC960401367 - Magenta

Future plans for the machines

Since the machines receive attention very infrequently, they are of limited value to the club as long as they continue to gather dust on shelves. A discussion on the mailing list in 2018 came to the conclusion that the club should retain the machines in the near term.

Thanks to:

Thanks to James Cox, Andrew Williams, Alex Dawson, Andrew Adamson, Elliot Nunn and Nick Bannon for contributing to this documentation of the history of these machines.

CategoryMachines

uccwiki: ProjectWhatIsThat/BeBoxen (last edited 2020-06-11 21:37:46 by AlexDawson)