So I ended up with a spare Celeron 667 box, and was going to move it along but then last night I thought what the hey! Let’s put BeOS on this thing.
Unfortunately it doesn’t like the onboard GPU, NIC or sound hardware, so I’ll have to eyeball them and see if there are any drivers. Otherwise I’ll have to find a PII or PIII board with discrete components (or at least an ISA slot or 2) so that I can mix’n’match.
Updates to come!
BeOS was a good thing back in the day.
Pity it died (like OS/2)…
This microsoft turdwaggon is starting to work on my tits like seriously.
Yeah, if I come across another Pentium-class box for cheap (enough) I’ll buy it and give it the OS/2 Warp treatment. Always been curious about that as well.
Going back to the Be(ige)Box, I did just find some drivers online for the onboard chipset and sound hardware… not sure if that includes the onboard NIC (fingers crossed it does) but if it doesn’t I think I have a Netgear 10/100TX PCI that is supported.
Now the questions become: how to get the driver to the machine (I’d say good old 3.5" over sneakernet) and then… how the hell do you install the drivers! Much ado to come.
Both were ahead of their time, but tragically died for different reasons. I was blown away every time I watched BeOS do something crazy with multimedia on modest hardware.
OS/2…dang, Warp was great if you had enough hardware for it. It just ran DOS and Windows apps too well.
Oh well, at least NeXTSTEP lives on…
I liked the beOS window chrome with the ‘tab’ interface. Not sure if it would make sense for a modern OS (window title bar space is valuable) but it looked neat in the mid 90s.
Hey @moufassa,
How are you going with the PPC640 I shipped over to you? (And that Sinclair Spectrum, too.)
Did I include my genuine (and original) copy of Elite for the Spectrum? That must be worth a fortune by now…
Love the Amstrad PPC640. Managed to get it to display CGA nicely on a mate’s Commodore 1084s, and very poorly over a simple RGBI-to-VGA converter that I built. Haven’t done a lot of playing since (lots of other projects 
).
I tested out the Speccy at a meet and it seemed to work well (once it worked, that is… fiddly little thing). The patch board that maps joystick inputs to keys was a real curiosity - nobody (including me) had ever seen anything like it!
Yes, Elite was included in that package.
Oh… I have a couple of other friends who also have PPC640s - we’re gonna buy up some D-cells and head into a coffee shop (separately, within 10 or 15 mins of each other) and set up our machines on separate tables, and just start tapping away as if we were working on a modern laptop.
Need to get some kind of covert camera action going as well, so we can gauge people’s reactions.
ZX80 clone…
Not retro, but I think it will fall in this category :
And some other stuff… although prices may be a bit rough.
That looks interesting!
I spent three weeks at their house in South Dakota one summer when I was 7 or 8. I played with this every day. I doubt it’s been used since.
[Edit: It’s in my garage now, pending a decision on what to do with it.]
That is worth quite a few bucks to a collector
What a find! I think those are not common, especially in that condition. Even the box looks to be in extremely good shape for 35+ years old.
I need to reach out to the Living Computer Museum in Seattle to see if they are interested. I have no need of this thing but don’t want to see it thrown out.
I would’ve collected it in a heartbeat!
Here’s hoping the museum will take it!
I’d have taken it as well, if you weren’t on the other side of the world!
Get him to post it to you!
(And get a 220 / 120v transformer if he does. )
I just spent a day reading this guy’s blog. I admire his skills at reviving old computers and sort-of have a hankering to try my hand at it. Except I already have too many hobbies and not enough time or money…
