Internet Appliance

8 Articles

A black device with a monochrome LCD sits on a wooden table. It's keyboard extends below the frame. On the screen is the "Level 29" BBS service login.

Internet Appliance To Portable Terminal

August 8, 2024 by 2 Comments

Few processors have found themselves in so many different devices as the venerable Z80. While it isn’t powerful by modern standards, you can still use devices like this Cidco MailStation as a terminal.

The MailStation was originally designed as an email machine for people who weren’t onboard with this whole computer fad, keeping things simple with just an adjustable monchrome LCD, a keyboard, and a few basic applications. [Joshua Stein] developed a terminal application, msTERM, for the MailStation thanks to work previously done on decoding this device and the wealth of documentation for Z80 assembly.

While [Stein] designed his program to access BBSes, we wonder if it might be a good way to do some distraction-free writing. If that wasn’t enough, he also designed the WiFiStation dongle which lets you communicate over a network without all that tedious mucking about with parallel ports.

If you’d like something designed specifically for writing, how about an AlphaSmart? Wanting to build your own Z80-based project? Why not start with an Altoids-sized Z80 SBC, but don’t wait forever since Z80 production finally ended in June.

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The Amstrad E-m@iler, The Right Product With The Wrong Business Model

June 25, 2024 by 29 Comments

One of the joys of the UK’s Electromagnetic Field hacker camp lies in the junk table, where trash turns to treasure in the blink of an eye. This year I returned relatively unscathed from my few days rifling through the tables,but I did snag a few pieces. One of them is a wired telephone, which would be a fairly unremarkable find were it not for its flip-up LCD screen and QWERTY keyboard.

My prize is a 2002 Amstrad E-m@iler Plus, one of a series of internet-equipped telephones from the British budget electronics company. The device itself and the story behind it make for a fascinating tale of a dotcom-era Internet flop, and a piece of hardware that could almost tempt today’s hackers.

You’ve Heard Of The Dotcom Boom, But Have You Heard Of The Hardware?

In the late 1990s, everything was about the Internet, but seemingly few outside the kind of people who read Hackaday really understood what it was really about. I’ve written before on these page about how hype blinded the CD-ROM industry to the shortcomings of its technology, but while that had in reality only gripped the publishing business, the Internet hype which followed had everyone in its thrall. You’re probably familiar with the story of the dotcom boom and crash as startup companies raised millions on shaky foundations before folding when they couldn’t deliver, but in parallel with that there was also a parallel world for hardware. The future was going to be connected, but on what and whose hardware would that connection happen? Continue reading “The Amstrad E-m@iler, The Right Product With The Wrong Business Model” →

This Week In Security: Operation Endgame, Appliance Carnage, And Router Genocide

May 31, 2024 by 3 Comments

This week saw an impressive pair of takedowns pulled off by law enforcement agencies around the world. The first was the 911 S5 botnet, Which the FBI is calling “likely the world’s largest botnet ever”. Spreading via fake free VPN services, 911 was actually a massive proxy service for crooks. Most lately, this service was operating under the name “Cloud Router”. As of this week, the service is down, the web domain has been seized, and the alleged mastermind, YunHe Wang, is in custody.

The other takedown is interesting in its own right. Operation Endgame seems to be psychological warfare as well as actual arrests and seizures. The website features animated shorts, a big red countdown clock, and a promise that more is coming. The actual target was the ring that manage malware droppers — sort of middlemen between initial shellcode, and doing something useful with a compromised machine. This initial volley includes four arrests, 100+ servers disrupted, and 2,000+ domains seized.

The arrests happened in Armenia and Ukraine. The messaging around this really seems to be aimed at the rest of the gang that’s out of reach of law enforcement for now. Those criminals may still be anonymous, or operating in places like Russia and China. The unmistakable message is that this operation is coming for the rest of them sooner or later. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Operation Endgame, Appliance Carnage, And Router Genocide” →

Web Server Like It’s 1998 With This Restored Internet Appliance

April 8, 2023 by 20 Comments

Hackaday readers fit into two broad categories: those who experienced the wild and woolly early days of the Internet, and those who are jealous that they missed it. And it’s safe to say that both groups will get something out of this aggressively Web 1.0 retro experience, courtesy of a server that was actually part of it.

This comes to us via The Serial Port, a virtual museum dedicated to 90s technology, where curators [Mark] and [Ben] managed to find a pair of Cobalt RaQ 3 servers from the late 1990s. The RaQ was the first true “Internet appliance,” designed to be as simple as possible to set up and operate. If you wanted to get your small business online, machines like these were just the ticket. They were designed to be as plug-and-play as possible, and they did a pretty good job of it, at least for the time.

The machines that showed up were quite the worse for the wear, which is understandable given the decades since they were last relevant, but that just makes it all the more fun to get them going again. One didn’t even come close to booting, but the other showed more promise.

The video below is the first of a three-part series, and has a nice introduction to the RaQ and its important place in the early Internet, as well as a peek inside the two machines. That revealed some leaky caps that needed replacement in Part 2; after that minor surgery and a little persuasion, the 300-MHz screamer was ready for a test run. It worked, and The Serial Port put it right to work in Part 3 hosting a gloriously retro home page. Hit the link at the top of the article and enjoy the 90s all over again — the visitor counter, the mixed fonts, the “Under Construction” animated GIF, and the reminder to bookmark this page in your browser, which was probably Netscape Navigator. We love the guestbook, too. But — no marquee?

Nice job, [Mark] and [Ben], and kudos for keeping this little slice of computing history alive.

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The Internet Without The Computer: 1990s Style

September 9, 2022 by 18 Comments

We think of the Internet extending to small devices as a modern trend, but it actually is a good example of how everything makes a circle. Today, we want the network to connect to our thermostat and our toaster. But somewhere between the year 1990 and the year 2010, there was a push to make the Internet accessible to the majority of people who didn’t own a computer. The prototypical device, in our mind, was Microsoft’s ill-fated WebTV, but a recent video from [This Does Not Compute] reminded us of another entry in that race: The Audrey from 3COM. Check out the video, below.

Many devices, like the WebTV, wanted to take over your TV set to save on a display. That doesn’t sound bad today, but you have to remember, the typical TV set in those days was not the high-resolution digital monster you have today, so the experience of surfing the Web on one was suboptimal. The Audrey actually had a cute little screen and a compact keyboard.

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Teardown: Nabaztag

May 26, 2020 by 27 Comments

In 2020 there is nothing novel or exciting about an online device. Even the most capable models are designed to be unobrusive pucks and smart speakers; their function lies in what they do rather than in how they look. In 2005, an Internet connected device was a rare curiosity, a daring symbol of a new age: the “Internet of Things”!

Our fridges were going to suggest recipes based upon their contents, and very few people had yet thought of the implications of an always-on connected appliance harvesting your data on behalf of a global corporation. Into this arena stepped the Nabaztag (from the Armenian for “rabbit”), an information appliance in the form of a stylised French plastic rabbit that could deliver voice alerts, and indicate status alerts by flashing lights and moving its ears.

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BeOS: The Alternate Universe’s Mac OS X

January 9, 2020 by 185 Comments

You’re likely familiar with the old tale about how Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and started his own company, NeXT. Apple then bought NeXT and their technologies and brought Jobs back as CEO once again. However, Jobs’ path wasn’t unique, and the history of computing since then could’ve gone a whole lot different.

In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities unseen in personal computers at the time.

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