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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 want the minutes of the board meeting where Jean said "screw apple. we're intuitively obviously worth so much more than that."
Heck, that memo would probably raise more on Ebay than what they got from Palm..
Is this a typo? Isn't this supposed to say 3COM or is there a 3Comm?
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
>I don't there were any OS's that could match be's great audio latency.
Mac OS X's CoreAudio architecture is delivering end-to-end latency of 1 Millisecond. Was BeOs better than that?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It is a nice operating system. You can get a free personal version from www.bebits.com or you can buy a more deluxe version from www.gobe.com -- oddly enough, I don't think you can get it from Palm.
BeOS was/is a commercial OS, based on a microkernel, and POSIX-compliant enough that you could compile and run more than a few UNIX console apps on it. It was one of the first OSes to use a journaling filesystem as the default FS, but could read a pretty wide variety of other filesystems, including FAT/NTFS, ext2fs iirc, Mac drives, and a few others. It was marketed as a multimedia-oriented OS, and that was certainly true: it was rock stable, booted fast, had a solid integrated video system and OpenGL support built into the OS, had good filesystem performance and decent network drivers.
It also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that. (I luckily burnt it on one of my backup CDs a year ago.) The main limitation was that it had one 512MB partition that was created as a file on an existing FAT or NTFS fs, but once it was running, you could copy it over to a spacier install.
However, there weren't nearly enough drivers, and not enough freeware developer support, so it stayed a niche operating system until the end. Although I know some composers (live AND tracker) that still do their editing work with a Be-based PC on one side and a Mac on the other.
Exactly. I've been to a few dot com auctions hoping to pick up some hardware on the cheap, however the stuff almost always ends up going for more than the cost of the same hardware new. For example, I was at one a while back where they had about 30 600 Mhz Gateways. That model had recently been discontinued and was replaced with a 750 Mhz model, which listed for something like $650 brand new. The used ones at the auction went for $800+.
I think what happens is that a company sends some clueless lackey to these things with instructions simply to buy some computers. They don't even bother checking what the stuff is actually worth.
Here's a new business model; start a company and buy a bunch of hardware. Play Quake for a few months with your friends and then announce that the unfortunate business climate has forced you to close up shop. Hold an auction and reap the profit. Repeat.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
are they going to hang out a Be For Sale sign? is that some fighting-terrorism-with-zen thing?
maybe now there'll be some more BeBoxes for sale...
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Between all the kids yelling "FIRST BID! FB!!!!" and the people holding up big pictures of a guy spreading his backside, nothing's gonna get sold.
"also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that"
You can still get it at mirrors and it was recently uploaded to bebits(BeOS's freshmeat). You can get both the windows and linux version here.
You check as well how to install the personal edition in a proper partition or make the original virtual partition bigger
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...
There's a kind of auction fever that people get caught up in and if you're selling it's a good thing, if you're buying they you'd better learn to keep your trap shut, lest your friends find out and laugh at you. Lots of this goes on on eBay. I've sold items for insane amounts, but also sold things for far less than they are worth. You never know who's going to show up.
A bit of strategy if you're there competing with some purchasing drones. Walk around and audibly critique items, i.e.
"Oh, bummer this is the model without an internal power supply. It's as good as andfill."
"I think this one smells burnt, probably one of their parts boxen"
"This looks like the model which electrocuted workers, I wonder how it did that, could be a serious liability."
"Well no wonder they went out of business, this model is 5 years out of date and costs a fortune to maintain."
"Wow, I didn't know anyone even used these anymore, they only run a very expensive operating system based upon Cobol!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm needing a replacement for my single-CPU doorstop. Two screamin' 66 MHz PowerPCs ought to hold my office door open twice as well as the PowerComputing Mac clone does now.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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.