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With the exception of his reference to Be, inc, this looks a lot like Neal Stephenson’s car dealership analogy from “In the Beginning…Was the Command Line”: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
BeBox had dual processors (unusual for the time) and the GUI had a little tool that let you see the load on both, and a little check box to turn off a processor so that you could force all the processes to run on on the other. If you turned off both processors the computer halted.
The Be employee I met at the time said they left it that way because that’s what you told it to do. And it was funny.
I always had to appreciate that commitment to pedantry.
The first review of the BeBox I read, the reviewer deliberately wrote code to cause the system to crash, opened up every app, and the only way he could get it to crash was to manually turn off both processors.
This was an excellent read I hadn’t stumbled upon before, and I just wanted to express my gratitude. Thank you.