Of course, only after doing all of my development and reflashing the original Huzzah board many dozens of times did I learn that the Feather version has auto-reset support so one can reflash it entirely from a command-line. The non-Feather version requires holding down two tiny buttons on the board to reset into its bootloader every time. Since I am not a hardware hacker and have no background in electronics, turning my prototype into a PCB was a bit daunting.
I downloaded the free version of EAGLE and stumbled through how to design a schematic and then turned it into a halfway-decent looking board. I soldered the components to one of them and then spent a frustrating day trying to figure out why I was getting strange results with it. I flipped the component around and rerouted all of the wires in the board design, which also allowed me to eliminate the vias, and then sent the new revision to PCBWay. This version produced the correct data on each pin, but was doing so inconsistently.
Today in Tedium: It was not a sure thing that digital convenience would someday fit in our pockets. For quite a long period of time, convenience simply meant a degree of portability mixed with the ability to sit in your La-Z-Boy and … type up an email. It does more than you might think.
They had a fire extinguisher nearby, because you never know, really. Oh yeah, be sure to check out our sponsor, CreditStacks. Sponsored By Creditstacks. Start building your future today with the credit card that helps jumpstart your professional journey.
An image of a MailStation in use, circa When your goal is to hunt for interesting gadgets, it always helps to be observant. This situation created a few side effects: It led me to get a stand for my laptop , so I now look like a total weirdo in the coffee shop.
Inside that thrift store, I found this thing:. Meet the Cidco Mivo Standard , which just celebrated its 20th year of existence. The MailStation was their pivot. You plug its modem into your RJ phone jack, and you can send emails using a lightweight monochrome LCD screen.
While there were secondary features, such as the ability to pull up news and TV listings and maintain an address book, the email feature was by far the most interesting thing about it. In fact, a PC Magazine review of the era noted that it was the perfect single-serving email device:. The Cidco MailStation does one thing very well: The device establishes nonthreatening email access for new users. It also came with a long phone cable and could use batteries, so you could potentially use it while, for example, sitting in a chair.
Later versions even were wireless—using cordless phone technology to allow you to sit anywhere in your house and type up your latest missive. Here are just a couple that I can see right off the top:. Another example that fits into this category is the GameShark modem for the Nintendo 64 that I featured a couple of months ago. Phone-based teletype machines. The device is essentially an updated version of the teletype machine first developed in the s to allow the Deaf community to use the telephone lines.
Due to very sluggish sales, it was discontinued in But, credit Apple again! A 4 GB micro hard drive inside holds up to 1, songs. The small 1. This was no different from touch pads found in newer laptops and notebooks.
Previously left-in-the-cold Windows users bought the Apple iPod mini and worried not about connectivity since the device supported both the fast FireWire and old-reliable, USB 2. Also added in the set is a holster which was an optional item in the original iPod. Apple hit another jackpot with the warm reception it had on its Feb 20, release - as well as the on the Feb It offered more hardware via its unique ' Springboard' module slot - which was actually just a Compact Flash CF card slot.
Another model, the Treo g did not have a physical keypad - it used Graffiti for data input. The Treo and the Treo share the same physical characteristics except that the former was a gray-scale release while the latter came in a bright color STN backlit display with over 4, colors.
And, once more, by the end of , PalmOne after they acquired Handspring upped the ante in the "smartphone" wars by releasing the much-sought after, Treo as well as the redesigned version, the Treo in late It was in mid that Handspring, the company, was bought-out by Palm, which in turn, was split into separate software and hardware entities - PalmSource and PalmOne , respectively. Diamond Multimedia Rio MP3 player The year was and iTunes was yet to become the dominant app in the then-too-confusing domain of audio transfer technology.
The sleek, gun-metal colored unit is no bigger than a deck of cards 3. NOTE : You can read my full blog of this gadget here. Gone were the handle seen in the 'Clamshell' models as well as the 'longish' lithium battery pack. Instead, Apple went for the more compact but higher 6-cell lithium battery packs. This was complemented by a smaller, more functional and similarly-colored power adapter.
Also, very helpful status indicator lights -including the 'Apple logo' were added to indicate battery charging status, in use or in hibernate mode. But his heart remained at Apple. When he returned in -and, after a huge Microsoft investment in the near-bankrupt company-, he took off where he left at Apple - creating and developing the Macs. Since, it was the decade of the Internet, in , he released the iMac internet Mac.
This baby was it. A unique feature of the 1st generation iMac was the use of round, hockey ' puck ' mouse —which had become so hard to find these days! Although this computer can now be also considered as an "antique", it still runs the latest and greatest as of Oct. Netpliance iOpener Stock version The tremendous popularity of the Internet can be attested by the fact that a gaggle of companies in the mid s came up with an assortment of easy-to-use-specially-designed-for-Internet-surfing-and-e-mail-only devices.
Or, so they thought. Almost all of them had long been gone, or, if ever they are still made, they are surely bleeding their companies' coffers dry. Netpliance, the company, became part of the dot-com bust in the early s. It was actually an enhancement of the original Apple IIc that the company originally released in which, coincidentally, was also the year they released the original Macintosh.
It came with a then, de-facto 3. The latter was named for its inventor, Dr. August Dvorak, who designed it with the goal of maximizing typing efficiency. The unit was finally discontinued in November This allows me to edit and compile code on my main laptop and send it over the network with nc to the OmniBook, where it then gets uploaded to the Mailstation and executed.
Perhaps someone more skilled than me can program some USB device like an Arduino to emulate an LPT port to make it easier to transfer code. Once a program has been tested by this dynamic loading, it can eventually be written to the dataflash itself to show up in the Yahoo! Add three AA batteries and you can have a completely portable Z80 computer running your own applications. I compile code with SDCC and then upload to the Mailstation over parallel port as described above with make upload.
Most of the original code fragments I found for the MailStation on the Yahoo! Additionally, all of the host-side tools like the program to send code to the MailStation were written to run on Windows, so I have written new tools that run on OpenBSD which could probably run on Linux quite easily. Update: An SDL-based emulator for the MailStation was being developed back in and has resumed development under new developers.
The OS that runs the MailStation is fairly easy to use given its target audience, and rather performant, especially given its slow CPU clock speed.
Some members of the Yahoo! Group were focused on reverse engineering that firmware code to map out all of the built-in functions and understand how it works, in order to write custom applications that acted like the built-in utilities.
The first 16 Kb page of firmware code from the codeflash chip is located at 0x with each additional 16 Kb page able to be swapped into slot 8 0x at any time.
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