1996
In early 1996, Be was again in financial trouble with JLG describing the 2 or 3
months leading up to the close of Be's April financing deal as "one of these
'extreme cash conservation' episodes".
Also early in 1996, Be revealed that, despite having received over 1000
developer applications, only 100 BeBoxen were actually available. Many
developers were disappointed to not receive one of the available BeBoxen.
To make matters worse, as a result of their lack of funds, Be actually stopped
manufacturing BeBoxen for a while, which in turn further frustrated the
fledgling developer community.
Once a new $14
million financing deal was inked in April, Be again had the resources to
begin ordering parts and to restart the production of motherboards.
Additionally, Be Inc was able to sign on a contractor for final assembly,
testing, packing and shipping of BeBoxen. Whilst this should have made life
easier for the Be team, in fact, they were plagued by a bad batch of sound
chips, problems with shipping, and miscellaneous other problems. This resulted
in a number of damaged systems being shipped to developers, some having been
damaged in transit, while others were simply insufficiently tested.
To address these problems with BeBox manufacturing and shipping, Be hired Don
Fotsch as Director of Manufacturing (with Kevin Peoples to assist).
After Don's appointment, Be Inc also entered into a distribution partnership
with Plat'Home Co Ltd in Tokyo, Japan,
to distribute the BeBox. According to the October 1996 (325) edition of Japan-US
Business Report, projected first year sales of the BeBox in Japan were
expected to be 1000 units.
Interestingly, after the demise of the BeBox, Plat'Home ran a contest in Japan
for a new case design. They intended to produce intel-based "BeBoxes" (some
with Bt848 video capture cards), using the winning case design.
On the software front, in late 1995 and early 1996 Be Inc ran a competition to
name their operating system. On 14th February 1996, Be Inc announced that they
had finally decided what to name
their Operating System.
Taking heed of suggestions to 'keep it clear and simple', Be decided not
to select any of the suggested names, and instead settled on calling it 'the Be
Operating System' or 'Be OS' (pronounced 'Bee Ohh Ess').
On August 5th, Be announced an upgraded
133MHz BeBox. The machine was very similar to the original Dual 66MHz
BeBox, but with newer 603e PowerPC CPUs running at an increased clockspeed of
133MHz. Additionally, the color of the bezel on the case was changed to a
lighter gray, and labels were added to the ports on the back of the machine.
In actual fact, despite publicly promising a future quad-processor BeBox, this was
the only publicly released upgrade to the original BeBox.
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