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.

Ah, the firesale....

[syrupMatt]

Having been to a number of these in my local area (nyc), I can say it is an excellent place to pick up hardcore geek toys that you would not otherwise be able to afford (cheap servers anyone?).

But for Be, there might be an added sentimental value to items. Pick up the box that you once downloaded your favorite os from, that type of thing.

Either way, its a sad day that we have to witness a Be firesale.

Somewhat Related

[webword]

Palm Be Apple Triple Merger? [sfgate.com]

Re:What about the code?

[Rude Turnip]

The code was sold to Palm. Be has only retained some bits of hardware, furniture and the right to sue M$ in an antitrust lawsuit. Some people are suggesting that Be's massive trading volume last week is a sign of the (hopeful) lawsuit annoucement coming up.

I emailed the auction company to find out if the items were going to also be auctioned online or just at the physical location. They haven't written me back yet...anybody here know?

Re:BeBox

[Rude Turnip]

I bought one a couple years ago by posting on comp.os.be and asking if anybody had one. An engineer from SF sold me his for $200.

All the cool stuff will probably be gone by now

[mrroot]

A friend of mine worked for a company who went bankrupt and had an auction of their remaining assets. Strangely, alot of the really cool stuff seemed to just disappear before the auction could take place, presumably stolen by the owners, employees, or friends of each, I don't know. Certainly this was illegal and if the creditors found out there could have been a lawsuit I suppose.

Who's job is it to make sure the remaining assets of the company make it to the auction? Ultimately the creditors are to lose (more).

If you really want a chair....

[dbc]

I recently picked up two very nice chairs from Sam Clar -- almost unused, full warrantee, half price. Seems they used to have a nice business renting furniture to dot-coms. Now they have a lot of chairs in inventory that local store managers are instructed to move out at what they can get for them. Notice how sitting is this chair help speling and gramaticly correctly my slash dot postings. Comfy, though.

Re:BeBox

[Russ Steffen]

At first, BeOS ran only on a platform called the BeBox. The BeBox was somewhat similar to a PowerMac, being a dual-processor PowerPC machine. The BeBox had these cool LED CPU load bar graphs on the front, and a port on the back called the GeekPort (a huge connector with all sorts of digital and analog I/O lines and other cool stuff).

Click here for specs

[DABANSHEE]

Well a summary anyway, at "the Linux for BeBox website" [sowerbutts.com].

Here's a quote...

"...Be only made about 1,800 BeBoxes, I believe, and they are rapidly becoming collector's items, so you'll have to move fast. Be produced two models, which were identical in all but the processors. The first model was the Dual603-66, which was powered by two PowerPC 603 CPUs, each operating at 66Mhz. The second model was the Dual603-133, which had two PowerPC 603e CPUs. Each of these ran at 133Mhz, and in addition had twice the level 1 cache size of the CPUs in the Dual603-66. Both models of BeBox have been criticised for the lack of a level 2 cache, but it was a simple engineering choice: the MPC105 (the memory controller, bus arbitrator and PCI bridge) could either support a single CPU and a level 2 cache, or two CPUs. The performance gains due to a level 2 cache were vastly outweighed by the performance boost from a second CPU. The CPUs are soldered directly to the motherboard; one cannot swap them for faster (or, if you were perverse enough) slower processors.

The BeBox has some amazing features. Firstly, it has both the ISA and PCI busses which are so common in the x86 PC world. This means that one can plug any standard PC peripheral into it. It also has both ATA (IDE) and SCSI 2 disk interfaces, with an external SCSI 2 port. It has a standard AT keyboard interface, a standard PS/2 mouse port, four standard 9-pin RS232 serial ports, four MIDI ports (two in and two out, for two channels), two standard PC joystick ports and 16 bit sound line in and out through RCA phono plugs and stereo minijacks for a microphone and headphones. It also has some more strange IO abilities; three InfraRed ports (for IR device control, not IrDA) and something known as the "GeekPort".

Plus, the BeBox has one amazingly impressive feature that no other machine in the world has. On the front bezel of the BeBox, there are two bar graphs made of green lights. Each graph represents the amount of work each CPU is doing - you can tell at a glance whether the application you're running is taxing the machine's processors or not. As they say, "We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can see the blinking lights!"..."

Don't Expect Much

[ewhac]

First, I'd like to thank the Slashdot editors for publicizing this auction, thereby assuring that every item will be bid up well over retail by over-enthusiastic tourists, shutting out budget-minded unemployed guys like me. *sigh*

Oh well, there's probably a few things you should know about the stuff up for auction. First off is that Gassée ran a tight fiscal ship. As such, you aren't going to find Aeron chairs or 26" flat panel displays everywhere. Fact is, the standard developer workstation was a single processor Frankenbox in a generic beige ATX minitower, with a 16" (nominal) monitor and $5 keyboard. A typical RAM installation was 128M, with 64M also being common. So you're not going to see 21" Viewsonics in great numbers. Nor are you going to see 1.4GHz Athlon machines; just about everyone used 266-700MHz Pentium machines. The sound card of choice, when there was one at all, was an ISA-based Soundblaster descendant.

Second, towards the end, there were virtually no functional BeBoxes left. Even the internal build machine was decommissioned when PowerPC BeOS was internally deprecated, around the middle of 2001. Those that were left were used primarily as serial debugging terminals.

Third, there is a ton of junk at Be. Dead monitors, dead motherboards, dead hard drives, dead PCI cards, bad RAM, etc. We ran sutff into the ground there. At one point we had 18 dead monitors lined up in the hall (which were slated for a massive roof disposal, but I convinced management to have them recycled instead). We knew where all those piles of crud were, and to avoid them. If the last of the Be people didn't throw it out, I'm sure the auction people can't tell the difference, and will try and sell paperweights alongside the good stuff.

And fourth, the former employees got first crack at all the good stuff.

What all this basically means is that you can be sure that all the BeBoxes that are left are either broken or incomplete (or, in some instances, empty cases being used to hold up bookshelves).

As for the good stuff that remains, I call dibs on the 'scope and logic analyzer :-).

Schwab
Former employee of Be, Inc.

P.S: Whoever ends up with the espresso machine better take damn good care of it, or I'll come after your ass.

Re:Don't Expect Much

[natenate]

At one point we had 18 dead monitors lined up in the hall (which were slated for a massive roof disposal

For those who didn't quite get the ``roof" reference:
http://cibo.dhs.org/hold/movies/clips.zip [dhs.org]

They included these clips (since R4.5), and other sundry pieces of media on every BeOS CD sold, including tribute songs:
http://cibo.dhs.org/hold/sound/songs.zip [dhs.org]

It was truly a special thing to be a part of (even if your part was miniscule).