Thin clients get even thinner...
On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 01:39:12AM -0700, larry a price wrote:
> I've been looking into portable text terminals lately, and I think i've
> found a real deal. The other day I foundthis thing called the
> { }
> { } $29.95 <<<<< USD
> { email PostBox(tm)Express } That may mean $49.00
> { } -$30 rebate
> { } if you sign up
> ------------------------------- for a years service
> manufacture by VTECH @$9.99/month
>
> featuring YaHoo!(also tm) Mail.
>
> I'm pretty sure it's a 286 system on chip (2400baud modem, 512k memory)
> but it can connect to the network and the speed is highly doable for an
> aftermarket radio link ;-)
>
> The ad and the box were surprisingly unforthcoming about technical specs,
> yet i suspect a somewhat chopped and folded version of our favorite
> operating system might lie underneath it' s little 40*80 grey screen. It's
> about the size and thickness of a paperback thriller and it has a little
> little keyboard with a little bit of button cruft, and a Phone Jack!
>
> It would acceptable for thumb typing or deliberate touch typing. And the
> blurb says it stores up to 500 messages (1_buffer * 500) where 1_buffer is
> the size in bytes of what they call a message. It looks like it would make
> a half decent reote terminal and it has a store and forward type of model
> where it squirts messages up and down and is read and edited offline.
>
> Who wants to have a go at hacking it? I bet we can do this thing up to to
> at least run short scripts or at minimum cross-compile with gcc and get a
> decent portable editor and ssh-terminal. I see it as meeting our own needs
> for portable longlife rugged terminals. And you dould probably get decent
> comms in the field if you hooked it up to a spread spectrum radio box
> ;-)
>
> Dependencies are the following libraries gcrypt,OpenSSH,glibc, and
> jabber on the servers to handle presence etc.
>
> Make no bones about it this a challenging hack, at present we don't know
> exactly what hardware lies underneath that tiny little keyboard but if it
> can run linux we can do it!! Grab 'em now before they get yanked off the
> market :P They're way too cheap to last. And they're marketing 'em to
> bored and jaded who want to get their email on the go, recase with a
> decent keyboard and they're ideal remote controls. (think couch and
> multimedia and editing global config files for your house)
>
> Yum, if you have one and are at mikes next week, we can get started on the
> reverse engineering...
>
> Larry Price | "We have seen the truth.
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] | And the truth makes no sense." -chesterton
> _______________________________________________________________
