When Jean-Louis Gassee unveiled the BeBox last October in Scottsdale, Arizona, the normally lethargic Agenda 96 crowd gave a standing ovation. Gassee, the former president of Apple's computer products division, left his post in 1990 to launch Be Inc. in Menlo Park, California. He has spent the past five years in near secrecy developing the BeBox, a new computer platform that boldly breaks from the Apple-and-Intel status quo.
Running Be's own operating system and armed with two PowerPC 603 processors (a quad version is already on the way), the BeBox provides true multitasking and multiprocessing, says Gassee, making it prime for audio and video applications.
"The BeBox is unfit for consumption by normal human beings," Gassee contends. "We are interested in people who write C++ code - the technophile market, the geeks and the applications developers. We're not going to try to take on Apple or Intel - it's impossible." Bebox: www.be.com/.
ELECTRIC WORD
Representative Barr Thwarts Louis the Lurker
To Be or Not to Be
