I remember first reading about BeOS and the BeBox in some 1994-or-thereabouts edition of WIRED (which featured an interview with Jean-Louis Gassee). I was utte

I remember first reading about BeOS and the BeBox in some 1994-or-thereabouts edition of WIRED (which featured an interview with Jean-Louis Gassee). I was utterly amazed by the screenshots of the GUI and the thought of a computer with “parallel processors”. The slogan “one processor per person is not enough” absolutely smote me and I was hooked. BeOS looked like everything nineties non-dismal utopianistic science fiction looked like and the BeBox with its dual RISC CPUs and “blinkenlights” on the front to display workload and a “GeekPort” on the back for attaching random hardware were at the very least very exotic machines with a lot of presence and that made quite a statement. At the time I also had my first interactions with NeXTStep, and I’m pleased how things went (overall) but back at the time, it seemed like “not choosing Plan Be” was going to have disastrous consequences. How wrong I was...