No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.
Later I became pretty successful and spent about 15 years paying massive, tax-deductible sums for tiny ahead-of-their times laptops from Sony, Panasonic, etc. until the first MacBook Air came out and finally delivered on the promise of small laptops with decent performance.
We all want low-power retro computing but expect reasonable latency in usage. We also want WIFI working in every room and e-ink that doesn't suck and doesn't cost half a car... And the ability to browse the web (HTTPS). It's just not there yet.
When someone will make a product this good with all of the modern life "requirements", that will be a vastly successful product I imagine.
My ideal setup before eyeing the e-ink space was a linux-based netbook and occasional internet access to offload heavy compute to powerful servers. I could see using this sort of setup in a similar fashion.
Asus' eeePc was awesome!
I'd love one with modern tech, long battery life, decent display quality, and long battery life. I don't care if it could only do text mode. That might even be ideal for my uses, which would primarily involve running Emacs and org-mode.
Interesting that they Sharpied-out all of the extraneous keys, except Windows.
I had an XT in high school and used to hit up the BBSs at 2400 baud watching each character light up on my green monochrome display. It was glorious!
It also sort of sets the expectations for the sloooow screen.
https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/pocket386-retro-dos-co...
IBM PS2s went for 10Mhz 1 Wait state, and 10Mhz zero wait states.
A 25Mhz 286 rivaled a 386 DX in speed in benchmarks, but was left in the just for any 32-bit apps. I had a 20Mhz 286 with 4mb of ram, but only for DOS programs such as CA-General Ledger.
https://www.engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html
A wire-free version running a Mac emulator would be pretty slick. Very usable with MacWrite or a HyperCard deck of recipes.
Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using).
Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank. But a forever-device used for something substantial, something touching money in any way, would have to be much more up-to-date.
Sure, eventually people stop updating software to work on old devices but that’s because the overwhelming majority of people have already stoped using that hardware for other reasons.
I certainly never manually updated anything. Obviously certain services like Lyft or messaging apps are unlikely to work without updates, but there was no reason to change and slow down my texting or email apps, they've done the same shit since forever.
It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.
My question would be Jet by Sublogic, and ... most unfortunately Xenix x86. Which leads me to believe that... you need a very low power cMos CPU, to have that battery life.
There are 12Mhz Harris cMos 286s but they are collector items, and the next step is 486slcs, which may run Xenix 386 w/ TCP/IP stack, rather well.
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1994/ERL-94-65....
you will spend 99 of those hours waiting for screen refresh (1/second).
It could even be implemented to look like some kind of extension card in RAM. You write native instructions to a piece of RAM and call a special (otherwise invalid) 8086 instruction and the native execution kicks in.
Or if you want to make it more ambitious, create a COM or EXE format which indicates that the instructions are really ESP32 native, but with full access to the BIOS functions with some kind of translation layer.
My own humble e-paper projects:
https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/
I can't really see a device like this getting used super heavily every day, so expecting it to still be usable from time to time for a few years seems reasonable to me.
I would love an eink laptop like this but with ARM, modern ports and linux
The IBM emulation stuff—it is a project, the some 40 year old OS seems quite limiting, but I can see why one might do that for fun. But, the hardware looks like… maybe something folks might actually buy? Maybe only us, here, though, haha.
Also, is there a mention of the refresh rate of the display? I wonder what gaming on it would be like. They provided a screenshot of Test Drive and Wolf3D running on it, but a video would've been nicer.
There's a 2:30 video of Wolfenstein 3D gameplay on the linked README page.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/a-few-weeks-with-the...
You can buy them off Aliexpress etc. quite easily
I find it amusing that the keyboard has a Windows key. Does anyone recognise what laptop it was originally from? It can't be a Thinkpad since there's no pointing stick, and I seem to remember some early Dells having a similar odd layout, but it's definitely an older one given the keys aren't islands. Odd placement of home/end and that right shift key aside, that actually looks better than most if not all laptop keyboards today (ins/del/home/end aren't Fn'd, and there's full-size arrow keys!)
To save others doing what I did there is an Android tablet like this called 'Daylight'
(Yes, I'm aware there are several other Android e-readers. The Wave has the unique combination of top-end handwriting functionality with waterproofing.)
I recall trying a Wolfenstein 3-D downport and it was getting about 5 fps on a NEC V40 (80188-equivalent) at 8MHz.
There's a bit more latency than I'd like with the typing. Though maybe that could be fixed on eink with partial updates?
For me the main benefit of a device like this would be reading and writing without distractions, so having it run DOOM smoothly would not help me! But I do really want low latency typing...
It wouldn't surprise me if XT was similar. I remember doing a pre-purchase review of DirecTV and the sat management was OS/2, long long after it was deprecated. Same behaviour in aerospace: keep the tech which works. This is why German armed forces were recently commissioning USB compatible SD type storage with insanely huge plugs, and slow interfaces, to replace 8" and 5.25" media for field upgrades of some devices.
xattt•5h ago
Tangential, but what happened to Intel Claremont, the solar-powered CPU? Did this project go anywhere or was it only a tech demo?