1990
1990 was the birth of Be Inc.
In the late 1980s, Jean Louis Gassée was a senior executive at Apple Computer, having been plucked from the
relative obscurity of Apple's French operations by then CEO John Scully.
As head of Apple France, JLG had managed to
outsell IBM, and had built himself an image as something of an icon for the
high-tech future. This was an important part of his promotion within Apple to
the head of Product R&D.
During his time at Apple, JLG was successful in incubating projects such as
the Macintosh II (the first
colour Macintosh, and the first Macintosh with expansion slots), the SE and SE/30 and
the IIFX. JLG also oversaw
the creation of the Newton
project, which under Gassée was a project with very different
objectives from the Newton that was released by Apple in 1993.
But not everything Gassée touched turned to Apple gold; he also was
responsible for the introduction of the overweight, under-powered and
over-priced Macintosh
Portable. As Steven Levy, a computer journalist and early user of the
portable opined "the Portable's main advantage was exercise; its density
roughly approximated that of barbells."
In early 1990, JLG had a serious falling out with Apple's CEO John Scully.
By mid 1990, JLG and Steve Sakoman, head of Apple's Newton Group, had
begun hatching plans to leave Apple and build their own machine that would
rival the Amiga in its ability to inspire a zealous loyalty amongst its users.
As legend now has it, the day after leaving Apple, both JLG and Steve Sakoman
made a trip to Fry's to buy parts for their first BeBox concept.
By the end of 1990, Sakoman had used the parts he'd cobbled together to build
the first prototype BeBox (though the term BeBox was yet to surface, and his
prototype box remained nameless).
According to Henry Bortman in 'The BeOS Bible' that first prototype box was a
simple charcoal coloured box with a logic board, AT&T Hobbit
processor, a hard drive, a floppy drive, serial and parallel ports, and a
graphics adaptor which Sakoman had also built himself.
According to Sakoman himself, however, "When designing the first Be
motherboard back in 1990, I began with a prototype that consisted of nothing
more than a single processor, memory, and a serial port. The next version
added slots and bus arbitration, the one after that additional processors,
then various flavors of I/O."
It seems likely that Bortman is referring to a later incarnation of the
Hobbit BeBox which surely didn't surface until sometime in 1991.
By the end of 1990 or early 1991, Sakoman and Gassée were joined by
several other employees (who all worked from their own homes) including
Benoit Schillings, Bob Herold and Erich Ringewald.
Benoit
Schillings was perhaps the only early employee who wasn't an ex-Apple
employee. Instead, he met JLG in September 1990 at an Apple Expo in
France. His experience with storage architecture and search engines in a
product called Marco Polo caught Gassée's eye as relevant skills needed
to develop the BeOS. Schillings flew out to the USA in November 1990 to check
out things at Be, and to present some of his Macintosh software. JLG and Steve
Sakoman were impressed enough to offer him a job. Schillings began working for
Be in March 1991.
Bob Herold was, like Sakoman, part of the Newton team at Apple, and responsible
for the Newton OS kernel. As Sakoman himself had predicted, since JLG's leaving
Apple, the direction of the Newton project had been changed to the point where
it was "not fun to work on anymore". After the initial approach from Sakoman in
December 1990, Herold joined Be Inc in March 1991.
Erich Ringewalk, another Apple employee, had been working on the Jaguar project
which "was essentially Be. The Be machine, the BeBox, the BeOS in a small
skunkworks project headed by Hugh Martin". Out of fear that the dual processor
RISC machine with its new lightweight SMP OS would kill the Macintosh, Apple
Execs reacted and canned the Jaguar project in June 1990. After 3 months
sabbatical he quit Apple and came to Be with concepts he had developed at Apple
for integrating a database with a filesystem.
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