JEAN-Louis Gasse looks more like a French film director than the director of a radically new computer company. He is in fact the chairman and chief executive officer of Be Inc, a company that has been working for several years now on an interesting computer.
Before that Mr Gasse was one of the leading lights of Apple Computer. But he is not interested in the home computer market; he is far more interested in what the high end can do - so he has created BeBox.
The BeBox works on two PowerPC 603 chips, dividing processor time between them as required. There are lights built into each side of the blue and red computer that show how the CPUs are being used.
The BeBox, it must be emphasised, is not a Macintosh; it has its own operating system.
This operating system has some things the Mac OS has not, such as pre-emptive multi-tasking, and some things that are unique, such as its built-in database.
The built-in database is an interesting concept: everything that you do on the computer gets put into it. This makes for much easier access to the information on the machine as the display of files can be organised in an almost limitless way as a result.
The machines will not be for sale for a little while yet. Right now Mr Gasse is more interested in finding developers to work on 'cool' applications. After he has succeeded he will concentrate on other things.
