Solid Rock, Blue BeBox A Lu-La

Merry Prankster Jean-Louis Gassée at Large Again On Home Turf

The 'fast one' was never. Half the time it became wretched excess; Paris is a place where this sort of anti-social behavior is not only legal, but normal. I do not recall Jean-Louis being excessively excessive; I do recall that we used to talk about the 'Paris Metro,' the paper I did cartoons for, before it went out of business twice.

Anyway, he was killing time - and inventing Apple-Seedrin, which he later sold to Apple; and because Jean-Louis ran it, it became somewhat successful, much to the annoyance of many - especially the computer company across from the bar in the rue de Courcelles. Because in the bar, under the guise of a modest 'fast one,' Jean-Louis was recruiting.

With this unlikely crew, the Macintosh computer was launched in France, where it still has a leading market position. I'm not sure if this is excessiveness or perversity; but France does have other slightly off-center things such as one-spoke steering wheels, 2CVs, and TGVs - so Mac fits in. Jean-Louis went to California, opened the Mac up to the public and put color in it and your newspaper or magazine is probably made on a Mac today. Not to mention your internet machine.

Jean-Louis' sidekick of yore, Jean Calmon, called at noon today and invited me to a party. Wow, I thought, there will be everybody from the press, there will be 'Venture-capital' guys, there will be 'bonzen' galore. As the Paris Pages man-on-the-street I had better look as prosperous as you might think we are; so I put on an Italian jacket and Italian tie I got 12 years ago and last wore to a funeral - oh - a long time ago, and went looking for Puteaux.

Everybody knows where Puteaux is. It is right beside La Defense, the place that is hard to describe unless you like concrete. I was glad it was Puteaux: the last time I got invited to a Jean-Louis thing was nine years ago and that time I just missed the bomb in the rue de Rennes, and my next bomb will be the third. All the same, I wish I'd listened more closely to Jean Calmon's directions.

Puteaux is one of those next-door places you can't get to from here. You can see it clearly, but you cannot see the helicopter that can take you there. Paris Pages reporters may not wear ties often, but we get the story, so I got to where I had to get to.

A nameless faceless grey corridor, more grey than I have ever seen. A photocopy hand-colored sign on the wall said, 'Be' and an arrow pointed down the hall. At the end of the corridor, another similar sign pointed down another hallway. 'Be' and an arrow.

At the end of the arrows, I arrived at a room. Also grey. No chandeliers, no waiters in black suits with platters of num-nums or flutes of champagne, no orchestra; just a grey room. The only singular thing about it was that is wasn't rectangular - and it contained no colleagues from the press, no 'bonzen,' no grand princes of capital; hardly anything in fact, not even muzak.

Everybody was wearing black jeans, except Jean-Louis, and me. He had a 'Be' t-shirt on, hiding a tie, if he even had one. Some of these people obviously hadn't shaved, because they weren't old enough to. I knew I had made the right decision to wear my black watch instead of the steel and fake-gold moon watch; otherwise I was horribly over-dressed.

I will assume here that everybody knows that two weeks ago Jean-Louis had a breakfast in Arizona with some nuns. Apparently he told some joke about a 'BeBox' that brought the house down; for the second time in only 32 years.

You also know that I don't know anything about these things from my recent 'report' in Paris Pages about the Apple Expo in Paris. But even I could guess that, given Jean-Louis' lifelong habit, the 'BeBox' is probably a computer. And I had put on a tie for it.

Well, since I was there, I may as well give you the technical jargon part. Some long time ago, some wrench monkeys in the 'states, bored with their automatic-transmission, pastel-colored, airplane-finned and chrome beladen street cruisers, asked themselves the question: 'What if we took the smallest, cheapest, least-equipped, bottom-of-the-line car in the catalogue, and dropped an eight-litre motor in it?' And, out of the old parts bin, 'muscle-cars' were born. They were very hairy and a lot of fun.

That is sort of what Jean-Louis Gassee has done. He has filled up a box with cheapo off-the-shelf computer parts, and dropped in a 'Hemi' with a dual-six-pack carb, and added straight-through dual exhausts. He put in a really big gas tank and skimped on the brakes. The transmission is a very simple and extremely robust six-speed unit without reverse. On the ambiance side the 'BeBox' has CD-stereo sound in and out and tons of digital video, lots of infra-red radar detection, and for those tinkerers among us, a 'geek' port where you can dock... whatever you feel like: a 'cigarette' boat or a Ritz hotel. The long and short of it is: the 'BeBox' is not for 'suit' guys and their word- processors or their spreadsheets. It is a 'George Lucas' dream factory 'make-me-another-episode-of-Star-Wars' machine.

The kids - probably had already connecting things up the 'geek' port.

All the 'BeBox' lacks, besides customers, is software. So, today, ten or fifteen years later, Jean-Louis is recruiting again.

Even though the 'six-speed transmission' is brand-new from the ground up; previous experience with PCs or Macs is not useless to programmers, but basically the 'BeBox' is a blank page - and the people that 'do' this one will write their own reference manuals - which will save them having to buy existing ones. But this is all jargon now.

The suitless host(ess) serving low-ball cocktails...

All these bashes have 'hostesses' so you'll want to hear about them as this is Paris and some of the girls here really look nice. You have the champagne flute in one hand as the hostess comes by with the num-nums you flag her and stuff some in your pocket in order to have a chat...

Jean-Louis was the hostess. A medium height, average-featured, dollar-millionaire, Be, Inc. founder, and today, hostess. Chattable even...

At the plain-topped two-table 'buffet' he poured Coke and Oasis and, really "high-life,' Perrier, into plastic cups. No flutes, plastic or otherwise. Num-nums were peanuts still in their shrink-wrap and potato chips. Oh, for the hardened excessives, there was canned beer. Of the twenty cans, nineteen were left when I followed the arrows on rewind, out of the place.

On the street outside, I wondered if this would be the only time that I would wonder - how - to get back to La Defense. Since the place is always in construction agonies, getting ever bigger and more complex, it may swallow Puteaux whole - and 'BeBox' will be inside - the commercial-techno-administrative, 2x32-bit, digital complex of the future. If you are reading this you are halfway there too.

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Updated 07/95