Obelix: The Bebox in Oz
The History of Obelix
My BeBox is named Obelix, and he is a Revision 6 BeBox with dual 66MHz PowerPC
603 CPUs. Currently, Obelix has 80Mb RAM, and 1.5Gb SCSI Hard Disk space, and is running BeOS R5.0.3 (R5 Pro with patches).
I first started playing with BeOS in its PR1 release on my Power Macintosh
7300/200, Cherub. That was fine and fun, but once I found out about the
existence of the BeBoxen, I just had to find one! I think it was largely the
flashing processor load lights, blue casing, and sheer 'geek' coolness of them
that attracted me.
BeOS PR2 came and went, and I obtained a copy of it from a MacTech magazine to
run on Cherub. By this stage I was actively searching for a BeBox, but in
Australia in particular, they are not very common! Anyway, I was browsing
through Ebay and all the comp.os.be.* newsgroups on a daily basis, and every so
often one would pop up for sale -- but they were all in the US, and the price
of shipping one all the way to Australia was not really an option for a poor
university student like me.
Eventually, I one day found the following post from Hugh Blemings:
From: Hugh Blemings
Newsgroups: comp.sys.be.misc,aus.ads.forsale.computers.used
Subject: FS: [AUST] BeBox (66MHz)
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 11:08:45 +1100
Xref: cs.mu.OZ.AU comp.sys.be.misc:10822
Hi,
Due to a lack of time to do it justice and with some regret, I wish to
sell my BeBox (Rev 6, Dual 66) This is the same unit that was
advertised a few months back.
The machine is in excellent condition, presently set up to boot either
BeOs or PPC Linux and has;
400M SCSI Hard drive (HP)
SCSI CD-ROM (oldish - Sony 2x speed)
16M 60nS EDO RAM
S3 Trio 64 VGA card (fully supported)
3.5" Floppy
Manuals and current R3/PPC CD-ROM
Original shipping carton (!)
Preference is to sell to a local buyer to simplify shipping etc. but am
prepared to ship overseas if required. Buyer covers freight from
Canberra, Australia.
Asking AU$1100 ONO, contact me by email with any questions.
Cheers,
Hugh
I fired off an email to Hugh then and there. A few emails later, after we had
agreed on a price and delivery details, I had a BeBox to call my very own!
Wow!! This, as you can see from the posting date, was right before Christmas
1998, so as it turned out, Obelix was the perfect Christmas present :-).
Hugh was amongst the very best and most helpful people I have ever purchased a
second hand computer from (and let me assure you, I have dealt with quite a few
people over the years of collecting old computers ;-). Everything was
meticulously packed up, (in original packaging), and everything was just as he
described it. We had a few phone conversations to finalise things like
passwords for the root user on the BeBox's linux partition (yes, Obelix came
preinstalled with both BeOS R3 and LinuxPPC).
The Naming of Obelix
As a consequence of coming fully configured, the BeBox also had a name, Obelix,
and I couldn't bring myself to steal away his identity, and so he remains,
always, Obelix. Interestingly, sometime later, I found out that Hugh was the
founder of BeOZ, an Australian BeOS user group that was formed in the very early
days of the BeOS. In BeOz Digest number 10 (dated 19th May 1996, and edited on
Obelix), Hugh explains how he named Obelix:
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C o n t r i b u t i o n s
Obelix Arrives... (Hugh Blemings, hugh at pcug.org.au)
I've been a fan of the Asterix comics series for years and given Be's
heritage, it seemed that giving my BeBox a French oriented name would be
rather fun and certainly appropriate. Obelix, as you may remember was the
inseparable friend of Asterix, the legendary Gaulish warrior from that
series.
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To read the full text of Hugh's article about Obelix in BeOZ Digest #10, click
here.
Today, Obelix is a somewhat venerable machine (compared to the modern beasts),
but the charm of being a BeBox has not lost its lustre.
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