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Be Gear Up For Auction
Well, if you live near the Menlo Park, CA area you should join what's evidently a number of slashdot readers at the Be, Co. auction. With the merger and dissolution of Be, all of their remaining hardware/furniture will be up for auction.
It's a sad comment that even at Be, Inc., they only had 20 BeBoxen left to auction off. I used to lust after those things. I wish they'd taken off. If I was in the US, I'd seriously consider trying to snap one up at the auction.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Here is how they looked in 1998, when hope was dawning. http://web.archive.org/web/19980101-19981231re_/ht tp://be.com
While I hope that some people get some good deals on the remainder of Be's assets, it's still a darn shame. Be was an elegant OS that really showed how much CPU horsepower Windows was wasting. And it was not a rehashed version of some OS from the 1970s with a hundred layers of legacy code piled on it.
;-) probably had little desire to be allied with a company as fickle as Be.
I think that much of Be's failure can be traced to their lack of loyalty to their customers. They abandoned customers that bought the BeBox, orphaning it with no support. They abandoned users who ran Be on Mac hardware. They abandoned people who purchased BeOS for the PC. Their web pages urged people to check back often for updates to BeOS 5, yet they made none for over a year. They even abandoned the developers that were making commercial and non-commercial software for BeOS, switching to an exorbitant pay-for-support arrangement that pretty much killed development.
When they announced that they were going into the Internet appliance market, that was the end for them. After abandoning every customer that they had ever had, they wondered why Internet appliance makers didn't flock to them. A major player in that industry (when it existed
I'm sure www.be.com is worth some dough!
Yesterday, booted into BeOS for the first time in over a year.
Such a snappy OS. Everything is so amazingly responsive.
Then, I opened up a project I had been working on, an SNMP console. The APIs to the system were such a pleasure to use. Everything was an object, and every window ran in its own thread. Just from building the basic app template, you gained services and abilities that Mac, Windows, and Linux still don't have without a lot of inelegant effort.
If you love software development, as I do, the BeOS was a technological masterpiece in a world of mediocrity. Learning to develop for it was truly a joy that you'd have to experience to appreciate.
It really made me sad to think that all of that is now gone.
I played around with the interface one last time, then I rebooted into windows and wiped my BeOS partitions.
Very very sad.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
[list of frivolous dot.com toys deleted]
*sigh* Okay, I'm going to repeat this one last time. Not all technology companies spent money on toys or provided extras. Be is a very clear example of a company that *did not* spend on such excesses.
Almost nothing was free at Be. No lunches, no soft drinks, no toys. NO fancy hardware. Most of the tech employees brought in equipment from home, because it was hard to requisition some kinds of equipment considered optional. When a component was needed, it was scavenged from non-working equipment.
There were some scooters, and probably some small "toys", but they were universally purchased by employees, who have since taken them home or on to new jobs.
I notice the original comment has been modded up as funny. You know, for many people watching an organization they were deeply committed to being disassembled, it's just, well, not funny. In this particular case, it's not funny, and it's not even close to true.
"This is the very chair, the very desk, and the very phone used by Jean Louis G-ass-e when he told Apple he was worth $400 million and they could piss off... and I got it for twenty bucks, slightly less than what Palm paid for Be"