[vcf-midatlantic] Now: BeBox Was: NeXT

[Ethan O'Toole]

For those not familiar, Be was a company launched by Jean Louis Gassie 
(spelling) of Apple. He I believe was the guy behind Apple's 55% profit 
margin (Source the Jim Carrolton book.)

Be was pretty good multimedia wise, good multitasking, was not decaying in 
that it was cleanly designed that updates and upgrades never harmed the 
root OS files I believe. It existed for the BeBox which was a dual PPC 
machine, Mac and PC hardware.

The BeBox was pretty unique in that it had a really cool set of IO ports 
including midi in/out, RCA audio in/out, a 37 pin D-Sub geek port that 
provided DIO and fused DC power for building random projects. I think it 
had 4 RS232 and parallel port. Pretty stacked IO wise out of the box.
It was a dual PPC 66mhz or 133mhz motherboard, and it might be mostly AT 
sized but the unobtanium IO sub-board plugs into the main board via a PCI 
like connector and screws directly into the back of the box.

  Apple evaluated Be and NeXTStep as the replacement for OS 9 and chose 
NeXTStep which became OS X.

I think BeOS might of been the first platform where the music DJ tools 
first showed up where the DJ uses a vinyl record that has a time encoding 
and the computer follows along super accurately, chasing the vinyl 
record playing a digital audio file. That is how a lot of the DJs do it 
now, laptop has music but still use physical turntables as the control 
surface.

There were some demos that were amazing in it's early days but it mostly 
faded.

A friend bought a 133mhz and was given a 66mhz, then gave me the 66mhz. I 
think when Be did upgrades from 66 to 133 machines, they had the end user 
move the IO board and plastics over, thus the shortage.

The front case doesn't look as cool as a SGI, but it does have two LED bar 
graph things that go all the way up the front that indicate the CPU load 
of the two processors.



> I wonder if this is the same one I gave away a few years ago.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: vcf-midatlantic [mailto:vcf-midatlantic-bounces at lists.vcfed.org] On Behalf Of Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic
> Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2019 10:09 PM
> To: Christian Liendo
> Cc: Evan Koblentz; vcf-midatlantic
> Subject: Re: [vcf-midatlantic] NeXT(s) f/s in Maryland
>
> Someone please get it for us!! We don't have one. :(
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:08 PM Christian Liendo <cliendo at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> That guy has a BeBox.
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 5:06 PM Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic <
>> vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I saw this on Facebook:
>>>
>>> https://m.facebook.com/groups/208724552490319?view=permalink&id=2732205783475504
>>>
>>
>
>
> ---
> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
> https://www.avast.com/antivirus
>
>