A few days ago was the 10th anniversary of the public unveiling of the BeBox at Agenda ‘96. The BeBox is dual PowerPC computer from Be Inc that was introduced in marketing brochures as follows:

We’d like to introduce you to the BeBox(tm), a highperformance, low-cost system designed to meet the demands of sophisticated computer users and developers. It’s the first true real-time, object-oriented system that features multiple PowerPC processors, true preemptive multitasking, an integrated database, fast I/O, and a wide range of expansion options—all at a price that’s agressively below that of any competitive offering.

With marketing slogans such as "unfit for consumption by normal human beings" and "one processor per person is not enough", the story of the BeBox launch is an interesting one.

After feverishly working throughout 1995, Be Inc finally decided that the results of 5 years of low profile work were ready for a public launch. When one considers that little over a year earlier, Be’s entire hardware platform had been made redundant by the demise of the AT&T Hobbit processors, this was a remarkable achievement (If you’re interested, you can read more about the history of the BeBox).

Of course, one significant factor in deciding to go public was that Be Inc was again in serious debt. It was hoped that the publicity from a public airing of their work would be enough to attract further funding.

Jean Louis Gassée was, however, reluctant to unveil the BeBox at Agenda ‘96, with its audience of industry analysts and members of the media. Gassée was instead keen to launch his baby to a crowd of geeks who he thought would really understand and appreciate what Be had achieved and where they were heading. Gassée’s own words on the Agenda ‘96 crowd were: “These are industry insiders … They all hate what we do. I wanted audiences of geeks.”

Despite Jean Louis’ reluctance, the pressure of a desperate need for new funding meant that Agenda ‘96 became the venue for the BeBox launch.

In his preface to the BeOS Bible, Henry Bortman provides the following rivoting description of the BeBox launch and the days leading up to it:

Gassée and his engineers arrived a couple of days early. They brought with them everything they needed for the demo – or so they thought. It had all worked flawlessly back at the office. But when they arrived in Scottsdale, Arizona, for the big event, nothing worked. The engineers called back to California, to get people to “bring more stuff”, as Bob Herold recalls. “Software, different hard disks, whatever they thought would work. It was a bit of a crapshoot.” They finally got it “mostly” working.

The day of Be’s presentation also happened to be the day that the O.J. Simpson jury announced its verdict. The BeBox demo had been timed carefully to be completed before the verdict was read. Although the demo system was still plagued with problems, Steve Horowitz, who was running the demo machine behind the scenes, “got very adept at moving things out of the way,” says Herold. “If the debugger would come up, he’d move it away before anyone noticed.”

Apparently the ruse worked. Be got a standing ovation, only the second time in the history of Agenda that anyone has received such accolades. Gassée was speechless. Literally. Anyone who knows Gassée knows that this is a rare event. “I wanted to say my thanks to a number of people. And I couldn’t do it.”

His momentary lapse of eloquence notwithstanding, Gassée’s gamble had paid off. “Agenda was the turning point. That got us in the big time. We went from nothing, in terms of VCdom, to the first tier VCs. Which is very good. Not just the money, but also access.” Not that the money was insignificant. While waiting for investors to come through, Gassée remembers, “we had a couple of near-death experiences. I’m not joking when I say that I’ve seen the whites of the repo man’s eyes.” Gassée keeps a Xerox copy of the four-million-dollar check from Dave Marquardt, dated April 9 1996, pinned to the wall of his office. Marquardt had been in the Agenda audience at Be’s public unveilling.

Following the public launch of the BeBox on October 3rd, Be was “a little overwhelmed” by the reaction. Their previously unknown website was swamped as hundreds of curious and eager developers applied to obtain a BeBox. Amidst this frenetic attention, Be Inc managed to ship over 100 BeBoxen to developers by the end of 1995.

The BeBox seemed poised to become a significant alternative platform for next-generation applications. It was billed as the first true real-time, object-oriented system that featured multiple PowerPC processors, a native OS with true preemptive multitasking, an integrated database, fast I/O, and a wide range of expansion options — all at an extremely affordable price. The BeBox enabled users to run multiple compute-intensive programs simultaneously, synchronize music and sound, view and edit videos, and access the Internet — all at the same time. It shipped with a full set of software development tools and technical documentation, at a time when this was unusual. No other product on the market could match its performance in its price range.

Of course many of the BeBox’s selling points blurred the lines between the BeBox and the BeOS, but this was clearly intentional — the BeBox was intended to be an entirely new computing platform offering both hardware and software innovations that were not possible in the existing platforms that were hamstrung by legacy baggage and the burden of backwards compatibility.

Promises were made that “the BeBox is the first member of the Be product line, which is being expanded to include four-processor and portable configurations”. Unfortunately work never really began on a BeBox portable, and the quad processor BeBox never made it beyond the prototype stage. (As an aside, Joseph Palmer recently revealed that he in fact still has the quad-processor prototype BeBox system in his possession).

Despite exposing the exciting to the excitable, the demise of the BeBox as a platform began in January 1997, less than 18 months after its launch. At that time, Be Inc announced their intention to abandon hardware development to focus their efforts on further developing the BeOS for the PowerPC-based Macintosh and Mac-clone market.

If you want to know more, or know a bunch about the BeBox already and just want to take a pleasant journey down memory-lane, head on over to my other site, The BeBox Zone, which is the authoritative source of information about the BeBox. You should also check out Joseph Palmer’s site. Joe was the designer of the BeBox, and he has recently posted an article about the BeBox’s 10th anniversary, along withan image gallery of Be Inc photos from around the time of the BeBox launch. He’s got some great photos of the BeBox assembly line (the first BeBoxen were hand-assembled at Be Inc’s offices), as well as a photo of the first two BeBox buyers.

If you’ve got any corrections or information to add to the story of the BeBox, I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to email me: andrew at bebox dot nu.