Rick Chipper
Rick Chipper was one of the early BeBox owners in Australia. In issue 12 of the
BeOZ Digest, he wrote a review of his BeBox (which arrived the day before a
calculus exam). Read on for Rick's first impressions of his BeBox Allanon (now
in the care of Jason Davis).
BeBox First Impressions - Rick Chipper (chipster@emedia.com.au)
He lost, I won!
I had a bet going with a friend for 5 bucks that my BeBox would get
here on Monday 25th for the sole reason that it would be the absolute
worst day possible to be distracted. The next day I had the most
difficult exam imaginable, all-out maths and calculus, so I had to
hold myself back and not play as much as I wanted. Of course it goes
without saying that I took a quick look, I didn't have the will power
to put it aside still in it's box until after the exam. :)
It's been tentatively named Allanon, it's big, it's blue and (*I* think)
it's beautiful.
Unfortunately it got a bit of a whack during transit, completely breaking
off one of the top "caps" on the front bezel. The prongs that normally
stick out the bottom got ripped right off. I'll email Be later and ask if
they would be so kind as to stick one in an envelope and mail it my way.
Apart from that it worked perfectly out of the box. After first carefully
checking and changing the voltage setting (which was set to 110!) I
hooked it up to my 17" Mac monitor. Smooth :)
Since I got the pre-configured package, I got a gig drive, cirrus card (I
think, haven't checked yet), 16 megs, cd, floppy, NE2000 ethernet,
keyboard and mouse. Plus the "x-file" green CPU load LEDs are extra cool.
Running the software was fun, I'm only just getting the hang of the
system overall, learning the kind of things that only come from
constant hands-on use (like alt-upArrow goes to the parent window:).
It crashed fairly consistently if I ran it for more than 1 hour doing
*lots* of things simultaneously. Apparently it doesn't like shutting
down with any apps still running. Now I find I can run it for a long
time without anything going wrong, but that's more a matter of me
learning what to do and what not to do.
As a sort of mock speed test I started up 5 BeLogo apps and a few
Kaleidoscopes too. The green LEDs maxed out against the top of the strip,
they almost seemed to be straining to be free of the confines of the
box ;) More CPUs should solve that problem, I'm already planning on
buying a 4 604 100mHz board when it becomes available. The apps all
appeared totally smooth, it was obvious the scheduler was correctly
distributing the available CPUs between them.
The smoothness of the system impressed me, coming from a Mac
background I'm used to doing something then waiting until the
application is finished after commandeering the entire system. Now I
can do anything and immediately do something different without even a
pause, including starting up an app. A few of my PeeCee friends
dropped by to try and rubbish the system in comparison to their
Win95/Pentium systems, they were hard pushed. One thing they did
mention was the "jerky" refresh of the back-windows in the browser.
They were right, but perhaps the main reason for that is that all the
windows are separate threads, rather than a single program updating
them all in a coordinated way. In the future I prefer Be's way, as it's
more flexible and powerful.
All in all, It's fast, it's flexible and it's fun. Sure, it's got a few
areas of improvement, but that's just par for the course. Let's focus on
making things better, making Be the best computer around.
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