This does not want to be a review of the computer (I hope to have one by someone who owns it for the next issue), but just a brief view on that new technology that is available today.

The BeBox is a macine born by the idea of Jean Louis Gasee', who is the funder of the Be Inc. He worked for some years at Apple and was amazed by the Amiga when it was released. Even though he thought it was the right way to do things, Apple didn't want to buy (or copy) the Amiga technology.
When Gasee' left Apple founded a new company whose intent was to create a computer based on new, low cost, powerful technology that could use the already avilable low cost technology developed fre PC compatibles where possible (standard I/O, keyboards, diskdrives etc..). Gasee' has defined his creature the natural evolution of the Amiga, and for some aspects he proved he was right.

The BeBox is a machine with a relative low cost but exceptional features and power. Based on a dual PowerPC 603e core (a version with two 66 MHz CPUs and one with two 133MHz CPUs) that provides lots of raw power, the BeBox can enjoy one of the most modern and professional OS developed by the same company. BeOS is able of multiprocessing and preemptive multitasking, it's OOP oriented, fast, powerful and has some advanced features that really make it a good choice for everyone which is used to an OS like the AmigaOS.

However, the BeBox as a hardware computer, is going to disappear due to the fact that the company has now limited its investments in the development of only the BeOS. This decision, described by the president of the company as the stopping of investments in a experimental technology that was just aimed to prove that there can be something better than PC compatibles, has put an end, in my opinion, to a wide spread of such a fantstic machine.

On the other end, the further development of the BeOS, that is going to be ported on every machine that has a PowerPC as its "brain" (PowerAmigas and A\Box included), can bring new life in a world that has not seen big improvements since 1980. Unix and WindowsNT, the most diffuse OSes used on those machine are surely not suitable for hobbist and personal computer in general due to their huge resource requirements and complexity.

So what the Be Inc. is (and was) producing is one of the most interesting technology of this years, but the market considerations are always much more important than the quality of the final product (INTEL and Microsoft can teach on this argument). So Be Inc. is in the same conditions of all the other small companies that try to impose their products in a market saturated by crap and obsolete techology, but with the advantage to have a new advanced product able to exploit all the raw power offerend by last generation CPUs, a thing that other OS are not able to do as they require new faster CPUs to work decently themselves, instead of being able to exploit them the right way for the applications they are going to execute.

I would say that the birth of companies similar to Be Inc. is a very good thing for the computer market, clearly showing the big limitations of the PC compatibles technlogy based on an architecture now more than 20 years old, a technology which lives more of the inertia of the market than for merits of its features.

This also show the fact that if motivated companies, like phase5, are able to produce high quality really innovative products, they can find the diffusion they deserve, giving a shock to a market which has been sleeping for too many years.

Apple and BeOS

Apple, the company who lives by selling PowerPC based machines (PowrMacintosh) had lots of problems tring to port its, now obolete, MacOS on the PPC, and the development of the new OS (called CopLand) has now been stopped after years of wasted money. After having considered very seriously the possibility of using BeOS as their OS, Apply decided to buy the NextOS technology.

So Apple's next generation OS won't be BeOS, as reported lately by some magazines that tried to forsee the future, but the good NextOS (expanded to become MacOS comaptible), that however requires a incredible quantity of resources.

AmigaOS and its future

The interesting aspects of this story is the fact that those OSes could run on our future PowerAmiga or A\Box together with the pOS and AboxOS, WindowsNT and all those OSes that now runs on PowerPC based computers.

This would be a new interesting aspect of the future machines we may buy in future, as till now, we have been provided with a unique OS excluded emulations and (in my humble opinion useless) Linux or FreeBSD.

The choice or availability of the OS will be very important in the future, as we'll have the possibilities of using lots of new applications, tools and software in general than we can now, making our machine again the best available one able to work as a bridge between what will become static and obsolete platforms.