7

I know that the BeBox was a short lived product, but whenever someone mentions it they never fail to also point out the "GeekPort".

While the possibilities of the GeekPort were tremendous, I've never heard of anything ever using it. At retro computing festivals where a BeBox appears, the port is once again dusty and unloved.

While there would be limited commercial potential given the relatively low production run of the BeBox, I'm just curious - was anything ever produced outside of Be Inc. that actually used this port? Even if it was never sold, what about any prototypes that made their way out into the wild?

Improve this question
4
  • 2
    Interesting. Since they went with standard (for the time) PC tower form factor and largely standard motherboard (PCI, ISA, AT keyboard, etc.) except for CPU, I wonder if they would have had more success making a far more standard late 486 or early Pentium system using a standard motherboard, throw on a coprocessor card instead of a 2nd CPU on the motherboard, and add an I/O card to get the GeekPort, Blinkenlights A/D, etc.
    – manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact
    Commented Aug 31, 2023 at 17:34
  • 2
    I guess your question somewhat defies the intended purpose of the GeekPort: It was designed in a way that you explicitly don't need a "commercial product" to connect something to it, but rather do your tinkering directly.
    – tofro
    Commented Sep 1, 2023 at 8:07
  • @tofro - right, because we are all expected to build our own boards from scratch to play (tinker) with Arduinos. Did no one sell any kind of product at all? Lots of ham radio or various computer club examples of small run products, either as kits or preassembled. But I never played with Be stuff, or knew anyone who did, so I'm not sure what the Be scene was like.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Sep 1, 2023 at 19:49
  • 1
    @manassehkatz-Moving2Codidact: I suspect they wanted two processors in a symmetric arrangement to cope with streaming media, which wasn't practical with contemporary 486/Pentium motherboards.
    – John Dallman
    Commented Sep 2, 2023 at 10:57

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .