The Strange (and Rare) Videogame Pics Page

BE INC.

BEBOX

The only hardware product made by Be Incorporated. The company, better known for their alternative operative system, Be OS, made it at first for this powerful and versatile dual-Power PC platform.

Here is the BeBox! Red and blue (like Be Inc. logo) uses PC standard components and a versatile new OS with true multitasking capabilities, support for multiprocessor systems and without compatibility problems. Only a few precious hundreds units were made and all were shipped to developers around the world (but in particular in Europe).

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
CPU	2 x PowerPC 603 at 66 MHz or 100 MHz Could support up to 8 CPUs
RAM	Up to 256 Mb
HARD DISK	Support for IDE and SCSI hard disks
INTERNAL BAYS	2 x 3,5" and 2 x 5,25"
DISPLAY	Support PCI SuperVGA controller
NETWORKING	Support Ethernet (ISA standard) Serial port for modems
INTERFACES	3 internal PCI slots and 5 internal ISA slots 1 PCI controller for SCSI II Standard PC keyboard and PS/2 mouse In and out MIDI ports 4 RS-323 serial ports 2 joystick ports 3 infrared ports Geekport (sincerely I don't know what it is...) In and out RCA jack ports and two stereo microphone jacks with support for 16-bit sound.

Two different configurations were available:

CONFIGURATION ONE	CONFIGURATION TWO
Minitower chassis	Minitower chassis
Motherboard with 2 PPC 603 at 66 MHz or 100 MHz	Motherboard with 2 PPC 603 at 66 MHz or 100 MHz
I/O board	I/O board
AC adaptor	AC adaptor
0 Mb of RAM	16 Mb of RAM
No hard disk	540 Mb hard disk
No peripherals	3,5" Floppy disk drive 4x CD-Rom SVGA Video card Ethernet card Keyboard and mouse
Software included: BeOS for BeBox Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE Documentation on CD-Rom	Software included: BeOS for BeBox Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE Documentation on CD-Rom
Price: nearly 10000 French Francs	Price: nearly 16500 French Francs

Several units were sold (probably up to 1000 unit) both in US and Europe. Until few months ago was easy to find used systems on the net.
After Be Inc. decided to develop only the BeOS (for Power PC and Intel processors), Be discontinued this interesting product.
Actually BeOS is only available for Intel processors since Apple refused to provide G3/G4-based informations to Be Inc.

BeOS

BeOS was once a very popular subject. There were rumors about a possible use of it by Apple for the next century MacOs. After Apple bought NeXT the hype sorrounding Be and BeOS faded away. The operative system is now available for both PowerPC Macintosh and Intel-based systems and is now at version 3.2 but it is struggling to have a much more heavier support from developers and users.
More info could be find at Be Inc. online site.

Note the heavy use of multitasking. In the middle left part of the screen there is a window displaying the use of the dual processor architecture.

Another picture of the BeOS at work. The rotating Be logo was probably a real time 3D object.
An almost complete (at least Be said) version of the BeOS (and a lot of software for it) for Macintosh based on the PCI architecture was included free in an old issue of MacTech (the most important developer-oriented Mac magazine).

I'll try to have more info on this great piece of hardware directly from Be soon! And also if I do not have plans to introduce more informations on BeOS, I'll soon include links on the subject.