Thom Holwerda over at OS News has nominated his top-ten most beautiful computers. Amongst worthy company including the SGI O2 and the NeXT Cube, I was very happy to see the BeBox right up there at number two. First place went deservedly to the PowerMac G4 cube.

Thom notes:

The PowerPC BeBox’ most distinctive feature was its front bezel, designed by Mark Brinkerhoff. Brinkenhoff said in an interview: [Be, Inc.] wanted a bezel designed that had, ah, a look of power, as well as one that displayed both CPUs running.”

And so it did: the two ‘columns’ at the sides of the bezel represent the power element Gassee was after. These two columns also house two series of LEDs (the Blinkenlights), one in each column, that indicate processor activity. Each of them was connected to a processor, and the series of LEDs would light up according to actual CPU activity. You cannot seriously say you would not want that on your machine.

Totally agree with you, Thom. The BeBox really was a ground-breaking design for a personal computer in the mid-nineties. I’m yet to find a geek who doesn’t drool over the BeBox when they first see one in the flesh.