If you’re interested in classic computing, there’s no better expert to talk to than Huxley Dunsay of Retro Roadshow. He brought a perfect example of an oddball 90s machine to the PCWorld studio: the BeBox. This design didn’t revolutionize the industry, but its dual-CPU setup and custom OS had a lot of brand-new features we now take for granted. Will Smith checks it out in our latest video below.
Be Inc., BeOS, and the BeBox hardware were a fever dream of two former Apple executives: Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Sakoman. In the mid-90s, before personal computers were in every home and Microsoft had strong-armed its way into a monopoly position, there was still room for new players in the space. The BeBox was an attempt to create both hardware and software that could handle multiple processors at once. And while it flopped—and flopped hard—it was a precursor to modern multi-core processors and multi-threaded software.
The 1995 BeBox itself looked like a pretty standard “tower” PC of the time, albeit with some interesting front fascia. Inside is a mix of custom and standard hardware (in between the AT and ATX times), most notably two PowerPC 603 processors running at a blistering 67 MHz each. (As Will notes, that’s several orders of magnitude less powerful than the processor in an Apple Watch today.)
Some of the custom parts of the case include an array of two LED columns visible from the front, which show a visual output of the two separate processor loads. Huxley couldn’t get the visual display on the decades-old machine working… until he replaced the BIOS battery.
Foundry
The BeBox was positioned as a “multimedia” PC, so the rear connection panel is kind of wild. You get tons of audio and accessory ports, including a Matrox video card and a custom “GeekPort” that was designed to interface with anything both digital and analog. It, uh, didn’t work out.
BeOS might be the more interesting and memorable part of this whole thing. The user interface didn’t look that different from the Windows, Mac, and Linux editions of the day. But as an OS built from the ground up to handle multiple processors, it was entirely unique. (Remember, the consumer version of Windows didn’t get that capability until the release of Windows 2000.) Though only 1,800 BeOS machines were originally sold, it enjoyed a small but dedicated user base.
Foundry
BeOS has an interesting history in and of itself. Be, Inc. discontinued its hardware sales in 1997, and then released a version of the software that could be run on Macintosh-compatible hardware, which used the same PowerPC processors. They then made an x86 version of the software, which could run on the same PCs as Windows.
Microsoft leaned on its PC manufacturer partners and barred them from shipping devices that were pre-loaded with both Windows and BeOS, effectively killing the company. The owners of Be, Inc. sued Microsoft, winning an out-of-court settlement for more than $20 million. The BeOS software was eventually sold to Palm (of the Palm Pilot, which didn’t last too much longer) and effectively killed off. But an open-source implementation of BeOS, called Haiku, can still run software originally intended for BeOS and the BeBox.
Thanks to Huxley Dunsay for the history lesson and demonstration. Be sure to check out the Retro Roadshow channel for more deep dives. And while you’re over there, subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube and join us for The Full Nerd show (plus other shows!) every week.