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Be Liquidation Sale
Anonymous Squonk writes: "Be's homepage has a message stating some of the details of their impending dissolution. One little item of note mentioned was 'Public Liquidation Auction January 16 (details to follow)' Who knows what kind of geek goodies might be available at rock bottom prices? Perhaps this could be our last chance to get our hands on a BeBox!" How about some of those nice LED CPU meters?
I've been to a couple of dot com auctions hoping to pick up hardware at great prices. Unfortunately idiots with their company check books stood by purchasing as much as they could without regard for price. People were paying the same price for two totally different machines!
Much of the good stuff is pretty scarce by the time you get to these auctions. If any employees didn't get paid you can rest assured that they grabbed some goodies to make up for it. A shirt and maybe a decent office chair would be all I could hope for.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sun's E10000 Control Boards do this really cool knight-rider KITT thing with 8 LEDs! :-)
I'll try to get pics next time I'm in the data center with my camera...
I recently sold for $1119.00 the BeBox that I bought my freshman year for $600 used. This marked first time I've ever bought a computer and it increased in value. Here's the eBay auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem& item=1302540562
Though this auction could be nifty, I don't think you're going to find any BeBoxes laying around Be Inc. mainly due to this little tidbit: Interesting history: David [Cantrell] obtained this BeBox from Be's offices in Menlo Park, CA. It was being discarded and he "rescued" it from the trash heap with the help of a former Be employee. It lacks the CPU load LEDs on the front, but other than that, it's still in great shape.
http://www.bebox.nu/beboxnames.php and scroll down to see the original post.
You did good work with BeOS and will be missed by many.
When I worked at Georgia Tech, I had enough money in a project that I decided to buy some multiprocessor boxes to test out their capabilities as a real-time data acquisition box. I bought two boxes: a BeBox and an OS/2 box from Indelible Blue.
I was on vacation when the BeBox arrived so two co-op students unpacked it and decided to give it a whirl. Just for grins, they opened it up to look at it before powering it up. What a lucky break. They had a lot of trouble sliding the case off and couldn't figure it out. Then one of them noticed a metal bar wedged between the frame and the shell. They gingerly removed a foot long metal bar that was about 1/4" square in cross-section that had what looked like paint covering about 4" of one end. It looked like something that was used to stir some paint or resin. It was laying across the back of the motherboard.
Needless to say had they powered the box up, the bar would have shorted out a lot of the conductors. We would have loved to know how it got there. It certainly didn't look to be any part of the box that had simply come loose.
Aside from that the BeBox was fun to play around with. I think it still is serving MP3s in another lab.
-tim
You wont be getting any BeBox parts, I can almost guarantee you that. I had a BeBox back in '98 that was missing the plastic "diffuser cover" from one of the LED CPU meters, and *nobody* (not even
people @ Be, who were very helpful in looking) had spare parts. Emails from people @Be indicated that most all of their people had switched to BeOS/Intel, and there were no spare parts for the BeBoxen left - and this was 1998.
A great ride? Man, I rode it from $6 a share to $3 a share. Wasn't so great for me! :)
At least I knew when to fold it, and didn't get stuck holding the bag at 10 cents a share. (My friend who was investing with me wanted to keep holding, I held his portion until they hit $2 then sold his share anyway, I told him it was for his own good.)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.