Installing BeOS on a TAM | Hacker News Reader

Installing BeOS on a TAM

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13 pointsmarban7 comments

The TAM is such a peculiar and interesting piece of rare Apple hardware.

The design is certainly truly unique, and its ‘Garbage Can’ subwoofer is oddly reminiscent of what would be the also bizarre yet awful design of the later Mac Pro designed that way.

Also, very very few computers had a TV/FM tuner at the time built in.

Mostly because nobody wanted TV on their computer. Apple had been trying to market that feature for years. There were 68K Macs with TV tuners like the Performa 638CD and the hardly-any-were-made Macintosh TV.

I had a Performa 6300 back in the day, and I bought the TV tuner card after a while. It wasn't too bad, especially with the remote. But it did feel kinda unnecessary, and I didn't use it too often.

I had a TV tuner card in my BeOS machine! This would have been the R4.5/R5 era though. Greybox PII 233 with 32mb RAM and a 3.2 gig hard drive, if I remember correctly. I was only about 15 or 16 at the time and didn’t have a stand-alone TV so I used it frequently.

BeOS was really amazing, too bad it didn't take off. I remember installing it on a PowerMac 7300 - not a slow machine back then, but certainly not top of the line. BeOS shipped with a folder with a few (maybe 6 or 8) QuickTime videos. You could easily do ⌘A → ⌘O (select all, then open), and they would all play smoothly at the same time, and there was still CPU time left for doing actual work. That was amazing, given that the same machine struggled with playing just two QuickTime videos at once under Mac OS 8 or 9.

TAM = Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, a stunning system when it was released, and a harbinger of form factors like modern iMacs.

The "stunning" thing at the time was the price. It was a Powerbook 3400c opened flat and mounted, without the battery, at twice the price. It was obsolete the moment it was launched, using a 1994 CPU in 1997 at the same time that Apple itself was already marketing the greatly superior PowerPC G3, and Intel had been shipping the Pentium II—comparable to the G3 and hugely faster than the 603e—for most of a year.

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