10 years since the BeBox Launch
Posted: 4-Oct-2005
10 years ago today, the BeBox was launched with great fanfare at Agenda 95.
After feverishly working throughout 1995, it was 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.
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
95, 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 95 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 95 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.
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