BeBox

I knew I had to do something special for the first “Zscaler Logo on a Weird, Old, or Obsolete Device” of 2025, so I’ve been hard at work repairing and restoring one of the rarest computers in my entire collection: the legendary BeBox!

Be, Inc. was launched by former Apple exec Jean-Louis Gassée in 1990 - he wanted to create a new platform which could take advantage of the latest technical advances, without being bogged down by legacy tech. A few years later they unveiled the BeBox, a powerful dual-processor workstation designed to showcase their innovative operating system, BeOS. 

The BeBox has two PowerPC 603 CPUs running at 66MHz, TONS of input/output options, and the iconic “Blinkenlights” - twin columns of LED’s which rise and fall in sync with the ‘load’ being carried by each of the CPUs inside. 

BeOS supported preemptive multitasking, multithreaded apps, advanced graphics and audio, and much more. It also features an innovative interface which is filled with lots of whimsical touches. Example: when something goes wrong while using its web browser, you don’t get an error code, you get a haiku poem! Here’s a sample:

Rather than a beep

Or a rude error message,

These words: ‘Site not found.’

Only around 1,800 BeBoxes were built (1,000 of the 66MHz machines + 800 upgraded 133MHz machines), and today they are considered an extremely rare and highly-collectable novelty. I’ve seen estimates that there may be fewer than 100 functional BeBoxes left in the world - I’m very happy to have one of them!

There was a brief moment when it looked like Apple might purchase Be and use BeOS as the foundation for a new version of the #Mac, but in the end they opted to buy Steve Job’s #NeXTSTEP, which became the basis of Mac OS X (and later, #macOS / #iOS / #iPadOS / #watchOS / #tvOS, etc.). Be Inc. was later sold to Palm, Palm was later gobbled up by HP, and today Be is long gone. It’s funny to imagine a parallel universe where Apple bought Be instead - perhaps we’d all be working on BeBooks and texting each other on bPhones!

I was a geeky 15 year old kid when I read a MacWorld Magazine article about the BeBox in early 1997 in the San Francisco Virgin Megastore (a very specific memory!) and I became utterly obsessed with getting one. It took over a decade, but I finally managed to buy this BeBox on eBay back in 2007 - it’s been a treasured part of our collection ever since.