Hi guys! Cool development- If you haven’t heard about the mythical “Steam Box/Piston/Steam Engine” already, it’s official; they’ve announced it! Here’s the link to the Kotaku page with the article and instructions. May the best man win!
Question Good sir What is the Steam Machine? and what does it do?
wow still don’t get the concept though sorry… 
Do I detect XBox One: Steam Edition satire?[quote=“SteveAdamo, post:3, topic:3067”]
living room
[/quote]
1 Like
Okay so this is about the new console that Valve announced alongside with their Linux based gaming operating system named SteamOS.
I just checked the badges I can achieve in Steam and indeed there is a badge “Steam Hardware Enthusiast” to be gotten.
If I understand the article correctly then 300 lucky Steamers that managed to get that badge will receive the beta version of the new console.
Sadly for me I don’t own a gamepad, but I might try my luck with the Hydra 3D mouse and see if that counts towards the achievement.
Close to 80000 people already managed to get that badge by the way, so better chances than lottery
Anyway I believe that is a super smart move from Steam, because the golden time of PCs is quickly becoming past.
Oh and I also love my Linux, may it be Ubuntu or Android… good stuff 
1 Like
From what I understand (reading some articles and listening to Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell’s talk at the D.I.C.E.2013 conference in London) this new hardware is a PC for your living room, not really an XBox. Valve doesn’t want to be in the hardware business, but they want to kick start a living room PC trend. The Steam Box will simply be a PC designed to be quiet and cool (as in temperature) enough to sit in a cabinet. It will have Valve’s Linux based gaming OS installed. You should theoretically be able to install Windows on it. As well you could make your own Steam Box and install Valve’s OS on it and it would work just the same. There will also be other manufacturers that make their own Steam Boxes. Valve is trying to do for the console market what IBM inadvertently did to the PC market. The IBM PC was able to be cloned since the operating system (DOS) was sold by a separate company (Microsoft). That meant other companies could make “PC’s” and the users could install DOS and run all the same programs that the PC would run, and thus the PC market was born and is still alive today. This is my take on it.
Anyway, If anyone wants to get their friend list up so they qualify we should add our steam names to this thread so we can add each other.
Mine is:
Sgt Bizon
Edit: I just got my badge and qualified for the beta: I just went into one of the steam channels and added random people until enough people accepted. I only needed a few more. If anyone needs more friends feel free to add me, I’ll accept if I see the invite.
1 Like
Indeed I was able to use my Razer Hydra as gamepad in the fullscreen modus of Steam.
So now I am one of the contenders for a Steambox.
@2_Zons yes that legendary MS-DOS deal. IBM believed to get a good deal by paying less and allowing MS to distribute their DOS to anyone. They completely underestimated the amount of IBM compatible PCs that would be sold by competitors.
It was an easy mistake to make at that time, large servers that distributed their output to multiple dumb terminals seemed to be the sensible approach to multiuser environments.
Households had the home computer systems (like the C64=, Spectrum and so on), oversized calulators in the eyes of IBM.
Same trap as with the tablets really, the experts just did not foresee that the market existed.