BEBOX, THE INNOVATIVE PC, DOESN'T LOOK BACK.

Byline: Dwight Silverman Houston Chronicle

The coolest personal computer around has two microprocessors, can run a half-dozen multimedia applications at once without stumbling and comes in a spiffy, dark blue box. It only costs $1,600, though you have to supply the monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Want it? You can't have it - not yet, anyway - unless you're a software developer willing to write applications for it. The BeBox is not ready for the masses.

But trust me. If you've got even a few drops of geek blood in your veins, this brand new machine from Be Inc. will call to you.

The BeBox is the baby of former Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassee. His idea was to create a personal computer that would take advantage of state-of-the-art technology without the burden of having to support older applications.

Anyone who has followed the development of hardware and software on the two major platforms - Intel/Windows and Macintosh computers - can appreciate that.

As processors become more powerful and advances are made in the way data moves through a computer's parts, the operating system software usually evolves to take advantage of that power. Unfortunately, developers have to worry about making sure that older software programs - called ``legacy applications'' - are not rendered inoperable by new versions of operating systems.

The result is a layering of the operating system's capabilities. For example, Windows 95 takes advantage of new graphics card capabilities but must be able to handle the graphics needs of older MS-DOS programs.

As a result, the new generation of operating systems are like Rube Goldberg machines. Yes, they let users do neat things, but at a cost. A 166-megahertz Pentium chip running Windows 95 slows down dramatically compared to how it would perform running just MS-DOS.

With the BeBox, you can't run OS/2, MS-DOS, Macintosh or Windows programs. It runs its own operating system, the Be OS, which looks like a cross between a Macintosh and some Unix window environments. It's very slick - and incredibly fast.

The computer is only being sold to software developers who are willing to spend time to write applications for a product that's not for sale yet. According to Alex Osadzinski, Be's marketing and sales vice president, several thousand BeBoxes have been shipped so far.

In designing the BeBox, a 12-person development team studied the past to build a machine for the future. Like the Macintosh, the BeBox has hardware and software that are tightly integrated, making for a more stable system. But like the IBM-compatible platform, it uses mostly off-the-shelf parts. Be plans to license clone-makers to build BeBoxes.

The BeBox being sent to developers runs on two 66-megahertz PowerPC 603 chips. These are the slowest PowerPC chips around - so slow that Apple doesn't use them in its Power Macintosh computers any more. But running the Be OS, they are blazingly fast, because the operating system is lean and mean. Under its current system board design, up to four PowerPC chips could be used.

The computer uses PCI and ISA slots, so almost any popular card can be plugged in. It's got a host of plugs on the back - a SCSI port, four serial ports, three infrared ports, two MIDI music ports and others.

There's also something that Osadzinski calls the ``geek port,'' a powerful connection that can be used for controlling other machines, such as robots.

The ability to use more than one processor is the key to the BeBox's power.

Software authors don't have to worry about making their programs work with dual-processor systems, as is the case with other designs.

Instead, the Be OS automatically assigns tasks to the processor.

There are other intriguing features. A database is linked to the file system to allow incredibly fast searching - a query searches the database, not the files themselves. That same database system can be used for other things, such as contact managers or inventory control.

Because the database runs at the operating system level, it's very fast.

If you're interested in more information about the BeBox, check out the company's Web site at http://www.be.com/.