But holy shit were those BeBoxes sexy as hell. As a teenager, seeing them for the first time, in an era of soulless, beige, badly named Macs like the "Performa", made a lasting impression that I still remember 30 years later.
Those twin vertically arranged CPU usage LEDs running up the sides of the case, pulsing as the box churned through multiple windows of buttery smooth video playback, while the operator simultaneously read and wrote to the disk, accessed the network, and manipulated the filesystem–without ever stuttering, dropping frames, or beachballing–was really quite something at that time. BeOS could multitask in a way nobody else was doing, and macOS still cannot match it.
Still think it would have been interesting to not let some of that tech die on the vine.
It was a GPIO port you could wire stuff into, think it even had ADC's and DAC's for analog signals. The case mounted LED CPU meter bars were sick - like an 80's amplifier VU meter. Amazing bit of kit those machines - true hacker boxen.
It wasn't really. It was just another closed platform. BeBox had a real struggle to boot anything but BeOS and the platform was so poorly documented that other than the manuals that came with it and the few brief descriptions in Be Newsletters, there is no real public documentation about any of the hardware. It was also smoke and mirrors, it barely worked in MP mode because the 603's they used didn't do proper MP. There was a software process that had to work around this, which then slowed down the OS in general. The dual processor Mac's with 604's actually ran rings around the BeBox performance wise.
Those twin vertically arranged CPU usage LEDs running up the sides of the case, pulsing as the box churned through multiple windows of buttery smooth video playback, while the operator simultaneously read and wrote to the disk, accessed the network, and manipulated the filesystem–without ever stuttering, dropping frames, or beachballing–was really quite something at that time. BeOS could multitask in a way nobody else was doing, and macOS still cannot match it.
Still think it would have been interesting to not let some of that tech die on the vine.