Finally giving a fair share of attention to the Intel world

December 14, 1998
by Alex Zavatone

If it hasn't been painfully obvious, I've been rather mac based for a significant portion of my life and even though life with blinders on is nice at times it's kinda hard to really develop crossplatform without a decent pc to do your pc development on.

With the recent purchase of my G3 Powerbook, this has become more obvious. The fact that the Mac can run Virtual pc at "fast enough to develop on" speeds of equivalent to a 133 or 166 pentium it is not a perfect solution. So what do we do when it comes time to check out a potential new system for the already cramped desktop? The smart developers hit the net and look for serious performance at a seriously low prices.

Back when Brian Gray and I were working on projects, the man alerted me to an "almost too good to be true" web page where pre evaluated pcs were being offered at prices so low, it seemed silly... or at least too good to be true. But nope, these were for real. Brian even bought one to keep since our returning PCs to Office Depot every 15 days was starting to raise eyebrows. Surprisingly, checking the site again revealed that the killer configs had become even cheaper.

The place these deals were found was on the website of the new OS, Be.com. Be doesn't have infinite resources so one of the Be employees had to do the research on how to get cheap systems to test the BeOS on. Well, this guy has done one great job. Systems start with 333 Mhz Intel PII processors and go up to twin 450 PII's. And the prices are definately worthy of paying attention to.

If you're thinking about purchasing a new pc for development, check out the "Ming Specials" from Be's web site.

Enjoy and don't buy too many of those twin 450's.

A Director user since 1987, Alex (Zav) Zavatone has worked on the engineering teams for both Director and Shockwave, 4, 5, 6 and 7. Recent investigations find him developing foundation classes for Director with asynchronous process management and other life threatening activities. In its early days, he had something to do with this Internet thing known as "DOUG". A noted ne'erdowell, slacker and laggard, Mr. Zavatone is nonetheless is trusted by children, small animals and the elderly. In his spare time, Mr. Zavatone rehabilitates lame desert trout.