Love it! Any idea how long the display can last? I've been playing around with e-paper (nothing as impressive as this!) dashboards. I use Waveshare displays that has a max of 1 million refresh cycles. The display you've used seems more capable.
It's probably https://www.good-display.com/product/440.html which is also 1mil refresh cycles and a fast refresh time of 1.5sec - around 185 hours of screen updates, so ~3 months of 5hrs a day typing or a few years of e-reader style usage.
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.
That seems like a really short lifespan...? Like you can use it for a couple years, but only if you don't actually use it.
There's an obvious aesthetic draw to e-ink, but it seems like passive-matrix monochrome LCD (like the Playdate) would be similarly power-efficient (or better [1]), longer lasting, usable in full daylight, and with better refresh rates.
How good are the best monochrome LCD screens now? Like... most reflective background and feel the flattest? (The vertical offset between the liquid and the background always bugs me.) Playdate (a Sharp Memory LCD [2]) seems pretty good but surprisingly low contrast. I suppose because the liquid crystal still blocks light even when its off? (I'm unclear here)
Looks like the OLPC transflective LCD screens are actually manufactured now [3] (5" display for $50 [4], maybe 10" but I'm skeptical [5]). The overall OLPC design was actually pretty great [6], even if many of the components weren't so great; it would be cool to see that revisited by some hobbyist.
From what I can tell, a partial refresh of the display (updating a smaller portion of the screen) performs less wear on the display than a full refresh, but it can still accumulate over time. Additionally some displays will require a full refresh after a certain number of partial refreshes to deal with ghosting.
I read an article from someone doing a similar project and if you don't do a full refresh every so often then you'll actually wear out the display faster (he burned one out real quick). It actually needs those full refreshes after so many partial updates.
Huh, interesting. I don't know anything about it, but my Kobo Libra has settings for how often to refresh the whole screen (e.g. every N pages, at the end of the chapter, etc.).
it does not matter in practice, let's say you do a full refresh once a second, it would take more than 11 days to do 1 million refreshes, if you do full refresh once a minute, it would take 2 years
Those numbers don't seem high, at all, for me.
Typing would probably cause a refresh more often than every second and even if it's delayed to be once, every second, it's still only 11 days.
For eink reader is more than enough, for digital typewriter eink is not good choice for display, there are high contrast lcd displays with in-pixel memory that can be used
For the usage being discussed here, 1 million is extremely low. For its original intended usage, which might cause one to dozens of refreshes per day, it's more than it'll ever need.
I don't know about this display but I've tinkered a bit with Waveshare E-Ink, that has this disclaimer:
"For e-Paper displays that support partial refresh, please note that you cannot refresh them with the partial refresh mode all the time. After refreshing partially several times, you need to fully refresh EPD once. Otherwise, the display effect will be abnormal, which cannot be repaired!"
I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.
Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support.
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.
> 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.
This depends pretty heavily on your threat model. You're right that a device like this is exceedingly unlikely to get exploited by attackers casting a wide net against common vulnerabilities. But an attacker targeting you-in-particular would love to learn you've put ancient hardware and/or software on the network.
Even if there are a lot of exploits on my Amiga (I don't own one, but work with me...), my value is likely low enough that it wouldn't be worth the cost to hack just me. If I was (or become) a major figure politically, militarily, or rich (maybe my 401k is that large - if you can get at it) it would be worth attacking me, but otherwise there are just not enough Amiga owners out there. Also you can expect someone with an Amiga is somewhat more likely than average to be protected - ransomware data and they restore from backups instead of pay. As such the value is exploiting Amiga is likely not high enough to be worth the cost.
Your entire comment is threat modeling, which is great! But it demonstrates my point: using an old, insecure thing is sometimes obscure enough to fly under the radar of one class of threats, but presents a juicy attack surface for another class of threats. And one's own personal risk for any given class of threats will vary depending on one's circumstances. So the parent comment's unqualified statement of, "security is not a consideration for such devices," isn't quite right.
The unique thing about an IBM PC compatible like this is that it has an absolutely massive library of software that will continue to work and be "supported".
i.e. The first picture you see of the machine is running Microsoft Flight Simulator. The First. They knew this was the standard for compatibility.
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.
It’s an ESP32. You can emulate any system you want.
Part of the point though is that emulating an original PC takes very little power. A 286 doesn’t get you much (who on earth wants to run a 286 OS)?
I could see a case for a 386/486 for running old DOS apps just so you have extra memory, but you could also simply port DOSBox-X to the ESP32 and do things that way.
You've touched on one of my favorite things about using this. There's so much software easily available for it that I could never even try it all even in 10 lifetimes. And it's easy to store too. For example, lets say the average program is 1MB. Then a tiny 128GB SD card could store somewhat more than 100,000 programs. Still not enough? This thing supports at least up to 512GB SD cards, which could hold something close to 500,000 1MB programs. I haven't tried 1TB yet. You can also store dozens of spare SD cards in the CPU compartment, so you can easily have more storage space and more software than you could ever use.
I spent a good chunk of my career in banking. I had many conversations to the effect of “see that RS/6000 in the corner of the network diagram? It processes $45bn in payments every day.”
More often in my experience, it’s one or two greybeards who have been there for 30 years, and are the only two people still in the workforce (or still alive) who understand how it works.
That's the wrong form factor for me, though. A TRS-80 Model 100 with modern guts would be my ideal, but something like this but with a faster screen would be nearly a tie.
This is not a suitable modern equivalent to the TRS-80 Model 100. It is much smaller and so uncomfortable to use. The arrow keys and trackball are well below subpar, and the software support isn't great.
I’ve never dumped a phone over its software. Ware, damage, swapping networks, meaningfully better hardware, or just losing the things explain basically all the replacements me or my friends / family have done.
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.
Just last month I finally moved on from my iPhone 6, which had been working great for 10 years, because some critical apps stopped working unless I upgraded, but couldn’t upgrade because apple no longer released iOS updates.
It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.
“Galling” and yet the iPhone SE had legendary long software support, more than any phone which came before. Seven years might not seem remarkable now but back in 2017 it was rare for Android phones to get more than two years of software support, and often that was mostly security patches, plus one major OS upgrade if you were lucky.
This is the reason I switched from Android to iOS. You may be (rightfully so) disappointed that you only got 10 years of use out of it, most of those years got security and even some feature updates. Compared to an Android phone where, if you don't buy it on launch day, you're lucky to get even a full two years of security only updates, and if you're very lucky (read: Purchased a Pixel or Samsung), one or two new versions of Android.
This has not been my experience with Motorola, unless you’re talking about OS major versions. With my last couple of phones I got several point versions and security patches for 3 or so years. It’s not my experience so far with my OnePlus phone either. Certainly I’ve seen phones that never updated from launch day, too, but I don’t think only Google and Samsung do updates.
My less-techy relatives are routinely forced to upgrade because all of their apps drop support for their hardware.
I'm in the process of replacing my nephew's tablet, because his favourite apps (Audible and YouTube) can no longer be installed on Android 7 - the newest OS his hardware can run.
My mum bought a second-hand iPhone 8 a couple of years ago, because the battery in her iPhone 4s finally died. She'll have to replace that soon, though, because a bunch of critical apps (her bank, health insurance, and a few others) no longer support that screen resolution properly, and often place buttons outside of the visible screen area.
I dumped my last phone, the Palm PVG100, because unwanted software updates made it too slow and ate up its battery life too quickly. It's too bad the PVG100 has the best form factor of any phone I've owned.
The Google Play Store presumably lol (or however Google pushes updates onto Android devices)
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.
I agree! Ten years ago, we had netbooks with adequate performance for many tasks, and battery life of 10+ hours. Given the advances in CPUs since then, we should be able to pack similar performance onto much smaller CPUs, using much less power. Screens have also advanced since then.
Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?
> Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?
They got eaten by tablets. We used to have netbooks and subnotebooks, but they were too weak for mainline Windows after XP (perfectly adequate with Linux, tho), and there wasn't a clear path forward for them.
These days, iPads and Android convertibles with keyboard covers are reasonably okay for the use case, if you don't need full lap-top ergonomics (they definitely benefit from a proper table).
ARM-based laptops (Apple and otherwise) are slooowly closing that gap again, but you're "only" looking at ~20 hours battery life, last I checked. Which is still better than the last batch of subnotebooks ca. 2010, which needed like 3lbs of batteries to reach that same endurance with a dual-core 1GHz Core Duo and less RAM than your average modern tablet.
You don't need 50hr of battery life. If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind. Laptops these days use less than 10W in light usage and will run off anything with a USB power port.
This is a "solved problem" by the mainstream retail PC manufacturers...
> If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind.
Unless you're not, because you're using an LTE modem, or inflight wifi on an aircraft without in-seat power, or any of a number of other real world scenarios.
On that note, whatever happened to netbooks? As someone who writes a lot and need a mobile device to do it on, they used to be perfect. Can't seem to find the form factor anymore. Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 happened to them, and Android/iOS tablets happened to their target demographics.
And notebooks got much lighter and smaller on average, compared to the netbook era. You used to need a 14" or 15" notebook with an inch worth of screen bezel to get a "full-powered" CPU and enough RAM to have a reasonable desktop experience, plus an unwieldy docking station to have enough ports to wire it up to a work place; netbooks were tempting companions to that.
Today you can get a full desktop experience (and even some fairly high end graphics capabilities) with a 13" laptop that's smaller than 11" subnotebooks and ligher than most netbooks used to be, and can fit a full keyboard.
E.g., a modern Asus PX13 is about the size of an 11" Asus eeePC, and just as heavy… but it comes with a 24-core Ryzen CPU, 32 GiB RAM, and an RTX 4070. If I'm on the move, I can just take that, instead of buying a companion device, and if I'm in the office, I can connect it to multiple daisy-chained monitors with connected peripherals using a single USB-C cable. Other Windows vendors have similar offerings.
And that's just looking at direct equivalents; completely ignoring the Apple-sized ARM elephant in the room. The M series CPUs are nuts in terms of performance, but the battery life is comparable to netbooks.
> Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.
For a while companies made ChromeOS tablets to fill the gap between notebooks and Android tablets, but the higher end Android tablets these days have cannibalized that market too. And "higher end" is relative; netbook prices (400-ish dollars) get you fairly capable 10"-ish tablets from multiple vendors, complete with precision stylus and keyboard/touchpad cover. That's big enough to get netbook-tier keyboards (which were never great, let's be honest), but small enough to fit in cargo pants pockets (very handy for air travel), and the battery life is measured in days.
What I want is a modern Tandy 102. Back in the 80's these things were getting days or even weeks of use on a set of AA batteries. I'd love to see a modern version of this - a low power, highly constrained device (not running Linux), that runs on AA batteries. With modern components, you would think you could makes something like the 102 that lasts for months an AA batteries, but nobody has made one.
The closest things I've seen are the AlphaSmart Dana (discontinued), Apple eMate (discontinued) and the Freewrite line of devices.
I've thought about trying to make one myself from an Raspberry Pi, but those are not very low power and they seem to be tied to Linux (or at least I'm not aware of alternative operating systems).
That's pretty neat. It doesn't seem to hit the days or months of use on AA batteries constraint. That said, I didn't consider the ESP32 line of SBCs and now I'm looking into low power variants so thanks for pointing this out.
If you want low power, try the nRF52 series of chips (e.g. nRF52840). Much less power hungry than the ESP32 with a comparable ARM core. Only Bluetooth though - no WiFi. nRF52840 sensors can run for months on a single CR2032 coin cell, and the power consumption while running is lower too.
For a time it was a new market, full of potential growth.
Then it got mature, every one who wanted one had one and given the nature of the device (low cost/low performance) it wouldn't need to be renewed for some time.
Some manufacturers went upmarket (bigger and more powerful devices for more money) blurring the line with their entry level laptops. It wasn't a recognisable market segment any more.
At some point, the market must have both shrunk too much and merged into other segments for anyone to care.
Mobile devices ate their lunch too I guess.
They're on eBay with absolutely cooked batteries lol. I bought an eepc for myself a while back, and a similar netbook recently for my partner, and while the batteries don't work very well, the netbooks themselves work alright with a lightweight Linux on them. I don't even bother with a desktop environment on mine.
I'm pretty sure the battery packs in both of them are just some 18650 in a trench coat, so at some point I'll probably attempt to replace them and hope I don't start a fire
You can still get netbooks or "small laptops" with 10-12" screens from Asus, Lenovo, etc. But they're not very good, definitely aimed at a budget market.
The next best thing is e.g. the Surface Laptop Go with 12.4" screens. Any higher and you have e.g. the Macbook Air.
But as another commenter pointed out, a tablet with stand / keyboard is likely the best alternative nowadays.
I had a Dell Latitude 2120 netbook for many years and I miss it. Small, decent display, good battery life, built like a bank vault. There’s nothing out there anymore with all of those properties.
There are a few commercial products popping up and marketing. I think youll find what you find here interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/
Im using a Boox palma 2 on a stand, and a Thinkpad Keyboard 2 to emulate the same thing. The battery life may not be 100 hours but considerable.
I'd love something ipad size with an attached keyboard/trackpad that did the very basics of compute but on a more modern stack. I think the biggest thing that would hold me back would likely be the slow refresh rate/no color in the display. I bet a setup like that with solar so is trickle charged could be built and have an effectively unlimited runtime. I wonder when high refresh rate/color e-ink like displays will finally make it?
Ideal for any kind of outside jobs, including for taking restaurant orders on a sunny patio.
With a stylus and hand writing recognition, the waiter wouldn't have to walk through a selection tree, but instead simply write the order like it was a traditional piece of paper.
Low power consumption. slap a small set of solar panels on there like Garmin watches, and possibly add a wireless power generator. I could see a device like that having standby battery measured in years.
This is running under emulation, but I wonder if the power savings would be even more (an order of magnitude?) if the hardware was "gate accurate" to the original but shrunken down to a modern CMOS process.
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!)
DM&P? I think their "Vortex86" range seems to be the modern take on "low-end x86 designed for embedded markets".
Wonder what happened to some of the others-- the ALI embedded 386SX seems to be suddenly popular in those "Pocket 386" laptops, but I'd expect there are warehouses full of old AMD Elan/NSC Geode style parts waiting to get tapped.
i am fairly certain i have an AMD geode device and while it is tiny (4x3x1.5 inches), it certainly isn't low power, compared to a rapsberry pi or an intel quark.
also those vortex86 are pricey, around the same price as a NUC, at least for the daughtercards, and none really looked "general purpose" although i guess a daughtercard with a computer on it was not unprecedented. apple and amiga both had such. i think apple even did apple on apple before anyone else considered if this was a good idea
I don't know if you've seen the videos, but the latency from input to result on the screen is, very, very bad. I don't think this is actually what you want.
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.
Someone else mentioned a Transreflective screen. we used to get a whole week with a Motorola Dragonball 6800 CPU and one of those screens on two AA batteries....
I want palm pilot back personally. Best mobile games still to this day.
That said a responsive x86 pocket top that also has a 5 day battery would be awesome too. Solar can change pretty quickly.
Out of curiosity how quickly could you log into wifi, check for whatever on the wifi, and turn off? Can you do that every 200 ms and have the wifi off most of the time? Is that what cell phones do already?
Mostly just curious about minimizing energy usage due to wifi.
Logging entirely out and back in every 200 ms would be bad, because associating is expensive and it probably takes longer than 200 ms, at least if you also want to do anything useful.
Agreed that latency and lack of WiFi would be problematic. I have no need of HTTPS though. I'm happy to live in a terminal and ssh to a "real" computer for anything that goes beyond vim.
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.
Not an XT clone per se. XT had 8088 CPU, CGA/Hercules display adapter, and a 640KB RAM with a PC speaker. This one has 80186 and 1MB RAM with MCGA (VGA) and Adlib emulation too. It's better than an XT.
I threw in a VGA, and dual 20Mb hard disks. 10Mhz, v20 and 8087 FPU. Dual 6550 serial card, great for modem, over kill for a mouse. A $9 sound card that was AdLib compatible on one chip.
Ye olde XT I had topped out with 640KB of RAM, a 20 megabyte and 15 megabyte MFM drives (ST-225, ST-419), two power supplies (the big full-height 15-meg drive needed extra time to spin up), one 16550 serial port card, no mouse, a SoundBlaster 1.5, a clock card, and a 2 megabyte EMS expansion card (with 72 individual DIP chips on it)....with a 10MHz 8088.
Weird times.
Eventually, someone donated a board with an AMD 386SX-33, which I immediately overclocked to 40MHz. Things became a lot different after that.
I use my boox max lumi as a secondary display daily for working in emacs. The eink is great for text/terminal use, the only issue I have is when i sometimes need to do any kind of mouse work (which, is basically never, when I use it for what I said above).
What I really want is a low power linux laptop that is not entirely without CPU/memory power, so I can program some simple things on it. I don't mind if it has _less_ power, I can use ssh for anything that is overly cpu-hungry.
Ive seen several devices that seem like they might suit my need, but I look at them for long enough and just won't pull the trigger. Either it seems overly much like a walled garden (like, I can program on the device, but it doesn't seem like a suitable spot to write blog posts in emacs for my blog or whatever), or its just too underpowered and I'm sure that 99% of the tools I use already won't work on it.
which is just cheap enough that I could see myself risking buying it without being sure that it will work with my other choices.
Nowadays, I feel like I should be able to run most of what I want on an android device that is built for power, and it should have a fairly long lasting battery because of its design; attach a trackpad, keyboard, and eink display, and my perfect device is here. I don't care if its not the thinnest device in the universe, a swappable battery (or, just load the thing with extra batteries) plus perhaps a portable solar charger would be amazing.
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.
I had an Eee PC 701. Pluses: the size was perfect. Minuses: everything else, from the CPU to the tiny drive to the tiny RAM to the keyboard to the trackpad was meh, at best.
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.
Check out GPD. I am typing this from a GPD Win Max and it's a lovely little x64 machine with 64 GB of RAM and a 7840U CPU (8 cores at 3.3 GHz) and ... it fits in a coat pocket. The battery life is okayish (~5 hours after 2 years?), but USB C charging means just buy extra battery packs.
This is awesome, only wish it was a 486DX2 with 4/8MB RAM instead, that would increase the possibilities of running more heavier operating systems, like Windows 95.
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.
> 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.
There's also the MobiScribe Wave (https://mobiscribe.com/), a color e-ink Android tablet, with frontlighting, and excellent battery life. On standby, it lasts for weeks. I have it hooked up to my Bluetooth keyboard. It runs emacs, a web browser, and email client - plus all the usual e-reader apps.
(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 think the closest thing I've gotten to the Linux + E-Ink dream(for me at least) is the Pinenote with a bluetooth keyboard. It's been a surprisingly enjoyable portable device(nice wireless keyboard doesn't hurt either) and it's powerful enough to do some nice simple stuff, then disconnect they keyboard and it's back to being an book/newsfeed reader.
Looks like someone found a good way to get rid of a bunch of new-old-stock embedded/industrial boards and/or SoCs that were sitting around in a warehouse somewhere in China.
The Original IBM AT used a 6Mhz 286, and then an 8Mhz 286, and then modified the ROMSs so you could not make a 6Mhz into an 8Mhz by swapping the crystal. Other vendors cranked up the speed to 10, 12, 16, 20 and finally 25Mhz.
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.
The AT was still the model for clones until the PCI bus came out. It's even in the names of devices and peripherals: ATX motherboard form factor, ATA (IDE) drive interface, etc.
This makes me wonder: Are there any solar-powered navigation computers? It would be cool to have an off-grid navigation computer that can load all openstreetmap tiles.
The Garmin 540/840/1040 bike computers have a solar option but it’s not sufficient to completely power the device. It just slows the drain by a few points.
It would be really neat if the emulator had some kind of "escape mode" where it could jump to and run the native instruction set.
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.
Powered by ESP32, which reportedly uses archaic 40nm technology. Aren't there some good ARM microprocessors built with 5nm technology, which would consume comparable power?
The brand new rp2350 from Raspberry Pi is also made on 40nm. Microcontrollers are often on 40nm or 32nm processes, but those processes didn’t stop being updated twenty years ago.
3 decades ago I did upgrade logistics for NMR labs using HP and Nixdorf based backends to run the machines. What amazed me was how the HP gui was X10. pre X10R4. They decided "good enough" and commercialised a species of interface with a trackball and keyboard, which at least in terms of GUI styling was 1:1 congruent with X10R1 as I saw it in 85 or so. I continue to notice this interface on Ultrasound and like, I guess having coded the FPGAs to work, they just stopped changing it.
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.
Goodisplay says "Although the refresh rate of monochrome e-paper displays is faster than that of color e-paper, we still recommend allowing at least a 180-second interval after completing a set of display updates. Frequent updates can negatively impact the lifespan of the ePaper."
can you? There's a MAME driver in macprtb.cpp you could work off—might want a few hacks in your implementation which is nothing new to Mac emulation. also this: https://github.com/evansm7/pico-mac
Came here to say something similar. A laptop with a high quality transflective screen (e-ink is a touch too slow) that can run classic Mac OS with absurdly long battery life would be a nice little device.
It sounds like it would be an awesome portable terminal emulator. Are there any good terminal emulator applications for DOS? How is the Minix 2.0 experience if you go that route?
Super cool. I wonder how this would work with one of those transflective LCDs, like the Sharp Memory thing they used in the Playdate.
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...
For a true prepper PC a RISC-V machine running Linux with these kinds of specs would be ideal. Even more cool would be a crank charger along with the solar panels.
Outfit it with a LORA modem capable of running one of those peer to peer LORA mesh text messaging protocols.
This is an incredible project! For someone looking to build their own Evertop using this repo, are there any specific hardware schematics, component lists, or 3D print files included or planned to be shared in the future to help with replication?
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.
This actually has some super cool field digital note taking applications, where one may be away from power for a long time and just needs a digital means of writing TXT files. Awesome work!!
While I love the work, it is more like an adaptation, I am quite certain there were no PS/2 keyboards back in XT days, rather the classical din pin one.
I'm also quite certain there were also no USB flash drives, SD card support, Wifi networking and e-ink displays in the early 1990s. It's not a replica in any way, it does not claim to be that. Just a cool compute device!
Clone meant, at least back in the day, that it was compatible with software written for the IBM XT. There were many clones with more ram, 3.5” disk drives, or better CPU (NEC V20) than the original IBM XT but they all ran MS DOS and WordPerfect and Accolade Test Drive and any other software you would expect so they were considered ‘XT clones’
And until a couple of days ago, I never heard anyone mention an "XT clone" as being an emulated 80186 on an ESP32 with almost none of the IO or expansion capabilities of an XT.
That appears to be a new usement of the term; an invention, if you will, or a perversion if you won't.
(I can emulate an XT with my pocket supercomputer. It's fun to play with that kind of thing sometimes. But to call it a "clone" is going too far.)
There's been some downports. They tend to be slow, some of them using things like rendering using 80x50 text modes in 16 colours to reduce the "pixel" count.
I recall trying a Wolfenstein 3-D downport and it was getting about 5 fps on a NEC V40 (80188-equivalent) at 8MHz.
Every source I've seen says it's a DOS machine with WordStar 4.0. I could have sworn I saw that it was an XT-clasd machine, but I can't source that detail right now.
While DOS is limited, you could port your most used tools or software to DOS or port them, there's a vim and emacs port, you can play interactive fiction, read e-books, program in Turbo Pascal 5.5/7.0, Turbo C / Borland C++ (1.x - 3.1), use hypertext, sqlite, markdown, perhaps use long filenames with FreeDOS or Calmira for windows 3.0?
It does seem a bit strange given the overall focus on power consumption and battery life. Surely emulation is a very heavy tax on the hardware? Imagine what it could do with software running natively.
Well, the creator chose to use a regular ESP32, which is Xtensa based, and is poorly suited for this type of application.
It's really weird anyways because the ESP32 fairly old nor as useful as something like the C6 which on paper could run Linux but without floating point.
Actually 100 hours is an understatement. It'll go at least 200 hours of constant active use on a single charge, even if you don't use power saving mode, and can easily get 500 hours or a lot more using power saving mode.
Love it! Any idea how long the display can last? I've been playing around with e-paper (nothing as impressive as this!) dashboards. I use Waveshare displays that has a max of 1 million refresh cycles. The display you've used seems more capable.
My own humble e-paper projects:
https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/
It's probably https://www.good-display.com/product/440.html which is also 1mil refresh cycles and a fast refresh time of 1.5sec - around 185 hours of screen updates, so ~3 months of 5hrs a day typing or a few years of e-reader style usage.
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.
That seems like a really short lifespan...? Like you can use it for a couple years, but only if you don't actually use it.
There's an obvious aesthetic draw to e-ink, but it seems like passive-matrix monochrome LCD (like the Playdate) would be similarly power-efficient (or better [1]), longer lasting, usable in full daylight, and with better refresh rates.
How good are the best monochrome LCD screens now? Like... most reflective background and feel the flattest? (The vertical offset between the liquid and the background always bugs me.) Playdate (a Sharp Memory LCD [2]) seems pretty good but surprisingly low contrast. I suppose because the liquid crystal still blocks light even when its off? (I'm unclear here)
Looks like the OLPC transflective LCD screens are actually manufactured now [3] (5" display for $50 [4], maybe 10" but I'm skeptical [5]). The overall OLPC design was actually pretty great [6], even if many of the components weren't so great; it would be cool to see that revisited by some hobbyist.
[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/403725
[2] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694
[3] https://www.kingtechlcd.com/product-category/transflective-d...
[4] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/5-inch-transflective-...
[5] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/10-inch-1200-1600-Tra...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO
For e-ink, does the refresh count include the entire screen or individual pixels?
From what I can tell, a partial refresh of the display (updating a smaller portion of the screen) performs less wear on the display than a full refresh, but it can still accumulate over time. Additionally some displays will require a full refresh after a certain number of partial refreshes to deal with ghosting.
I read an article from someone doing a similar project and if you don't do a full refresh every so often then you'll actually wear out the display faster (he burned one out real quick). It actually needs those full refreshes after so many partial updates.
Huh, interesting. I don't know anything about it, but my Kobo Libra has settings for how often to refresh the whole screen (e.g. every N pages, at the end of the chapter, etc.).
it does not matter in practice, let's say you do a full refresh once a second, it would take more than 11 days to do 1 million refreshes, if you do full refresh once a minute, it would take 2 years
Those numbers don't seem high, at all, for me. Typing would probably cause a refresh more often than every second and even if it's delayed to be once, every second, it's still only 11 days.
For eink reader is more than enough, for digital typewriter eink is not good choice for display, there are high contrast lcd displays with in-pixel memory that can be used
For the usage being discussed here, 1 million is extremely low. For its original intended usage, which might cause one to dozens of refreshes per day, it's more than it'll ever need.
I don't know about this display but I've tinkered a bit with Waveshare E-Ink, that has this disclaimer:
"For e-Paper displays that support partial refresh, please note that you cannot refresh them with the partial refresh mode all the time. After refreshing partially several times, you need to fully refresh EPD once. Otherwise, the display effect will be abnormal, which cannot be repaired!"
https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/1.54inch_e-Paper_Module_Manua...
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I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.
Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support.
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.
> 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.
This depends pretty heavily on your threat model. You're right that a device like this is exceedingly unlikely to get exploited by attackers casting a wide net against common vulnerabilities. But an attacker targeting you-in-particular would love to learn you've put ancient hardware and/or software on the network.
Even if there are a lot of exploits on my Amiga (I don't own one, but work with me...), my value is likely low enough that it wouldn't be worth the cost to hack just me. If I was (or become) a major figure politically, militarily, or rich (maybe my 401k is that large - if you can get at it) it would be worth attacking me, but otherwise there are just not enough Amiga owners out there. Also you can expect someone with an Amiga is somewhat more likely than average to be protected - ransomware data and they restore from backups instead of pay. As such the value is exploiting Amiga is likely not high enough to be worth the cost.
Your entire comment is threat modeling, which is great! But it demonstrates my point: using an old, insecure thing is sometimes obscure enough to fly under the radar of one class of threats, but presents a juicy attack surface for another class of threats. And one's own personal risk for any given class of threats will vary depending on one's circumstances. So the parent comment's unqualified statement of, "security is not a consideration for such devices," isn't quite right.
The unique thing about an IBM PC compatible like this is that it has an absolutely massive library of software that will continue to work and be "supported".
i.e. The first picture you see of the machine is running Microsoft Flight Simulator. The First. They knew this was the standard for compatibility.
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....
It’s an ESP32. You can emulate any system you want.
Part of the point though is that emulating an original PC takes very little power. A 286 doesn’t get you much (who on earth wants to run a 286 OS)?
I could see a case for a 386/486 for running old DOS apps just so you have extra memory, but you could also simply port DOSBox-X to the ESP32 and do things that way.
yeah, yesterday we had a post where someone was running fully up to date linux on a Nintendo Wii
You've touched on one of my favorite things about using this. There's so much software easily available for it that I could never even try it all even in 10 lifetimes. And it's easy to store too. For example, lets say the average program is 1MB. Then a tiny 128GB SD card could store somewhat more than 100,000 programs. Still not enough? This thing supports at least up to 512GB SD cards, which could hold something close to 500,000 1MB programs. I haven't tried 1TB yet. You can also store dozens of spare SD cards in the CPU compartment, so you can easily have more storage space and more software than you could ever use.
There are a lot of 'forever devices' currently touching money in major financial institutions.
I spent a good chunk of my career in banking. I had many conversations to the effect of “see that RS/6000 in the corner of the network diagram? It processes $45bn in payments every day.”
did you work at Chase too
Yea, and armies of engineers supporting them.
More often in my experience, it’s one or two greybeards who have been there for 30 years, and are the only two people still in the workforce (or still alive) who understand how it works.
That's the wrong form factor for me, though. A TRS-80 Model 100 with modern guts would be my ideal, but something like this but with a faster screen would be nearly a tie.
In case you haven't seen this: https://www.clockworkpi.com/home-devterm
This is not a suitable modern equivalent to the TRS-80 Model 100. It is much smaller and so uncomfortable to use. The arrow keys and trackball are well below subpar, and the software support isn't great.
Ouch. I'd had my eye on those before but hadn't heard reviews one way or the other. Those would be bummers.
I've drooled over those a few times. All of their models are out of stock right now, though, which makes me wonder if they're still making them.
How about the ZeroWriter Ink? https://www.crowdsupply.com/zerowriter/zerowriter-ink
The focus on the bundled firmware is word processing, but it's open-source and built around the popular ESP32 microcontroller family.
Wow, I love the looks of that. I have a Freewrite Alpha that's very similar at first glance, but it has a tiny LCD screen and isn't open source.
And if you fancy making your own…
https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal
> Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support.
They rather put their phones in a drawer because the battery isn't good anymore.
I’ve never dumped a phone over its software. Ware, damage, swapping networks, meaningfully better hardware, or just losing the things explain basically all the replacements me or my friends / family have done.
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.
Just last month I finally moved on from my iPhone 6, which had been working great for 10 years, because some critical apps stopped working unless I upgraded, but couldn’t upgrade because apple no longer released iOS updates.
It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.
Same with my wife's original iPhone SE. The hardware is doing fine but she's being forced to "upgrade" because of software. It's galling.
> A boring, not-young, not-cool, not-working-at-a-startup IT generalist.
I think you’re cool!
“Galling” and yet the iPhone SE had legendary long software support, more than any phone which came before. Seven years might not seem remarkable now but back in 2017 it was rare for Android phones to get more than two years of software support, and often that was mostly security patches, plus one major OS upgrade if you were lucky.
This is the reason I switched from Android to iOS. You may be (rightfully so) disappointed that you only got 10 years of use out of it, most of those years got security and even some feature updates. Compared to an Android phone where, if you don't buy it on launch day, you're lucky to get even a full two years of security only updates, and if you're very lucky (read: Purchased a Pixel or Samsung), one or two new versions of Android.
This has not been my experience with Motorola, unless you’re talking about OS major versions. With my last couple of phones I got several point versions and security patches for 3 or so years. It’s not my experience so far with my OnePlus phone either. Certainly I’ve seen phones that never updated from launch day, too, but I don’t think only Google and Samsung do updates.
My less-techy relatives are routinely forced to upgrade because all of their apps drop support for their hardware.
I'm in the process of replacing my nephew's tablet, because his favourite apps (Audible and YouTube) can no longer be installed on Android 7 - the newest OS his hardware can run.
My mum bought a second-hand iPhone 8 a couple of years ago, because the battery in her iPhone 4s finally died. She'll have to replace that soon, though, because a bunch of critical apps (her bank, health insurance, and a few others) no longer support that screen resolution properly, and often place buttons outside of the visible screen area.
I dumped my last phone, the Palm PVG100, because unwanted software updates made it too slow and ate up its battery life too quickly. It's too bad the PVG100 has the best form factor of any phone I've owned.
Who… who was doing the updates?
The Google Play Store presumably lol (or however Google pushes updates onto Android devices)
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.
Software and battery, I reckon, are the mobile phone arena's area for disruption.
I agree! Ten years ago, we had netbooks with adequate performance for many tasks, and battery life of 10+ hours. Given the advances in CPUs since then, we should be able to pack similar performance onto much smaller CPUs, using much less power. Screens have also advanced since then.
Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?
> Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?
They got eaten by tablets. We used to have netbooks and subnotebooks, but they were too weak for mainline Windows after XP (perfectly adequate with Linux, tho), and there wasn't a clear path forward for them.
These days, iPads and Android convertibles with keyboard covers are reasonably okay for the use case, if you don't need full lap-top ergonomics (they definitely benefit from a proper table).
ARM-based laptops (Apple and otherwise) are slooowly closing that gap again, but you're "only" looking at ~20 hours battery life, last I checked. Which is still better than the last batch of subnotebooks ca. 2010, which needed like 3lbs of batteries to reach that same endurance with a dual-core 1GHz Core Duo and less RAM than your average modern tablet.
Not a perfect solution but I've used an ipad with a magic keyboard for this exact purpose when travelling.
You don't need 50hr of battery life. If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind. Laptops these days use less than 10W in light usage and will run off anything with a USB power port.
This is a "solved problem" by the mainstream retail PC manufacturers...
> If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind.
Unless you're not, because you're using an LTE modem, or inflight wifi on an aircraft without in-seat power, or any of a number of other real world scenarios.
On that note, whatever happened to netbooks? As someone who writes a lot and need a mobile device to do it on, they used to be perfect. Can't seem to find the form factor anymore. Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.
> whatever happened to netbooks?
Windows Vista and Windows 7 happened to them, and Android/iOS tablets happened to their target demographics.
And notebooks got much lighter and smaller on average, compared to the netbook era. You used to need a 14" or 15" notebook with an inch worth of screen bezel to get a "full-powered" CPU and enough RAM to have a reasonable desktop experience, plus an unwieldy docking station to have enough ports to wire it up to a work place; netbooks were tempting companions to that.
Today you can get a full desktop experience (and even some fairly high end graphics capabilities) with a 13" laptop that's smaller than 11" subnotebooks and ligher than most netbooks used to be, and can fit a full keyboard.
E.g., a modern Asus PX13 is about the size of an 11" Asus eeePC, and just as heavy… but it comes with a 24-core Ryzen CPU, 32 GiB RAM, and an RTX 4070. If I'm on the move, I can just take that, instead of buying a companion device, and if I'm in the office, I can connect it to multiple daisy-chained monitors with connected peripherals using a single USB-C cable. Other Windows vendors have similar offerings.
And that's just looking at direct equivalents; completely ignoring the Apple-sized ARM elephant in the room. The M series CPUs are nuts in terms of performance, but the battery life is comparable to netbooks.
> Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.
For a while companies made ChromeOS tablets to fill the gap between notebooks and Android tablets, but the higher end Android tablets these days have cannibalized that market too. And "higher end" is relative; netbook prices (400-ish dollars) get you fairly capable 10"-ish tablets from multiple vendors, complete with precision stylus and keyboard/touchpad cover. That's big enough to get netbook-tier keyboards (which were never great, let's be honest), but small enough to fit in cargo pants pockets (very handy for air travel), and the battery life is measured in days.
What I want is a modern Tandy 102. Back in the 80's these things were getting days or even weeks of use on a set of AA batteries. I'd love to see a modern version of this - a low power, highly constrained device (not running Linux), that runs on AA batteries. With modern components, you would think you could makes something like the 102 that lasts for months an AA batteries, but nobody has made one.
The closest things I've seen are the AlphaSmart Dana (discontinued), Apple eMate (discontinued) and the Freewrite line of devices.
I've thought about trying to make one myself from an Raspberry Pi, but those are not very low power and they seem to be tied to Linux (or at least I'm not aware of alternative operating systems).
https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal
That's pretty neat. It doesn't seem to hit the days or months of use on AA batteries constraint. That said, I didn't consider the ESP32 line of SBCs and now I'm looking into low power variants so thanks for pointing this out.
If you want low power, try the nRF52 series of chips (e.g. nRF52840). Much less power hungry than the ESP32 with a comparable ARM core. Only Bluetooth though - no WiFi. nRF52840 sensors can run for months on a single CR2032 coin cell, and the power consumption while running is lower too.
Those look great!
The industry got a lot better at making laptops thinner and screens bigger. Users liked thinner laptops with bigger screens.
For a time it was a new market, full of potential growth. Then it got mature, every one who wanted one had one and given the nature of the device (low cost/low performance) it wouldn't need to be renewed for some time. Some manufacturers went upmarket (bigger and more powerful devices for more money) blurring the line with their entry level laptops. It wasn't a recognisable market segment any more. At some point, the market must have both shrunk too much and merged into other segments for anyone to care. Mobile devices ate their lunch too I guess.
They're on eBay with absolutely cooked batteries lol. I bought an eepc for myself a while back, and a similar netbook recently for my partner, and while the batteries don't work very well, the netbooks themselves work alright with a lightweight Linux on them. I don't even bother with a desktop environment on mine.
I'm pretty sure the battery packs in both of them are just some 18650 in a trench coat, so at some point I'll probably attempt to replace them and hope I don't start a fire
You can still get netbooks or "small laptops" with 10-12" screens from Asus, Lenovo, etc. But they're not very good, definitely aimed at a budget market.
The next best thing is e.g. the Surface Laptop Go with 12.4" screens. Any higher and you have e.g. the Macbook Air.
But as another commenter pointed out, a tablet with stand / keyboard is likely the best alternative nowadays.
I had a Dell Latitude 2120 netbook for many years and I miss it. Small, decent display, good battery life, built like a bank vault. There’s nothing out there anymore with all of those properties.
It's tablet cases with bluetooth keyboard now.
Killed UMPC, then killed by iPhone/iPad.
There are a few commercial products popping up and marketing. I think youll find what you find here interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/ Im using a Boox palma 2 on a stand, and a Thinkpad Keyboard 2 to emulate the same thing. The battery life may not be 100 hours but considerable.
I'd love something ipad size with an attached keyboard/trackpad that did the very basics of compute but on a more modern stack. I think the biggest thing that would hold me back would likely be the slow refresh rate/no color in the display. I bet a setup like that with solar so is trickle charged could be built and have an effectively unlimited runtime. I wonder when high refresh rate/color e-ink like displays will finally make it?
> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality.
like paper? :D
Ideal for any kind of outside jobs, including for taking restaurant orders on a sunny patio.
With a stylus and hand writing recognition, the waiter wouldn't have to walk through a selection tree, but instead simply write the order like it was a traditional piece of paper.
There is a community of people that have been making "writer-decks". It might be similar to what you are describing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/
> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality
Just jailbreak your eink Kindle?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969
Low power consumption. slap a small set of solar panels on there like Garmin watches, and possibly add a wireless power generator. I could see a device like that having standby battery measured in years.
This is running under emulation, but I wonder if the power savings would be even more (an order of magnitude?) if the hardware was "gate accurate" to the original but shrunken down to a modern CMOS process.
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!)
Intel makes the quark which is like a 486dx that runs on a watch battery. There are a few models now, but I think that qualifies?
The Quark was discontinued in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark
still existed, i have 2 of them. they're on ebay for <20USD
There is a spin off of Via that makes 386 or 486 clones still today...forget the name but you can find them out there.
DM&P? I think their "Vortex86" range seems to be the modern take on "low-end x86 designed for embedded markets".
Wonder what happened to some of the others-- the ALI embedded 386SX seems to be suddenly popular in those "Pocket 386" laptops, but I'd expect there are warehouses full of old AMD Elan/NSC Geode style parts waiting to get tapped.
i am fairly certain i have an AMD geode device and while it is tiny (4x3x1.5 inches), it certainly isn't low power, compared to a rapsberry pi or an intel quark.
also those vortex86 are pricey, around the same price as a NUC, at least for the daughtercards, and none really looked "general purpose" although i guess a daughtercard with a computer on it was not unprecedented. apple and amiga both had such. i think apple even did apple on apple before anyone else considered if this was a good idea
It's called a TrackPoint. ;-)
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Take my money.
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.
I don't know if you've seen the videos, but the latency from input to result on the screen is, very, very bad. I don't think this is actually what you want.
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.
Someone else mentioned a Transreflective screen. we used to get a whole week with a Motorola Dragonball 6800 CPU and one of those screens on two AA batteries....
I want palm pilot back personally. Best mobile games still to this day.
That said a responsive x86 pocket top that also has a 5 day battery would be awesome too. Solar can change pretty quickly.
That would be a reimplementation of the venerable HP 95LX palmtop.
Rats. Those are good points and you're right. I do so want that, though.
I think it would be 90% of the way there if you swapped the e-ink for a transflective panel with some form of RLCD.
Yeah a MacBook Air type device with such a screen would be interesting.
Out of curiosity how quickly could you log into wifi, check for whatever on the wifi, and turn off? Can you do that every 200 ms and have the wifi off most of the time? Is that what cell phones do already?
Mostly just curious about minimizing energy usage due to wifi.
You stay associated, but other than that: yes.
Logging entirely out and back in every 200 ms would be bad, because associating is expensive and it probably takes longer than 200 ms, at least if you also want to do anything useful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11e-2005#APSD
Agreed that latency and lack of WiFi would be problematic. I have no need of HTTPS though. I'm happy to live in a terminal and ssh to a "real" computer for anything that goes beyond vim.
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This is basically the HP 200LX on steroids.
I so desperately wanted one of those.
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.
Not an XT clone per se. XT had 8088 CPU, CGA/Hercules display adapter, and a 640KB RAM with a PC speaker. This one has 80186 and 1MB RAM with MCGA (VGA) and Adlib emulation too. It's better than an XT.
I was thinking the same thing when I saw 80186 and the display.
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's some XT++, but it's below the AT specs. That's the material difference.
It also sort of sets the expectations for the sloooow screen.
This one has ESP32 just running 80186 emulator.
Still, it's not emulating an XT. XT is a very specific PC configuration. Maybe they just wanted to emphasize that it was ancient.
Fully upgraded, my XT had VGA, 1MB including extended memory shenanigans, a sound card, a SCSI card, and Ethernet.
I threw in a VGA, and dual 20Mb hard disks. 10Mhz, v20 and 8087 FPU. Dual 6550 serial card, great for modem, over kill for a mouse. A $9 sound card that was AdLib compatible on one chip.
Ye olde XT I had topped out with 640KB of RAM, a 20 megabyte and 15 megabyte MFM drives (ST-225, ST-419), two power supplies (the big full-height 15-meg drive needed extra time to spin up), one 16550 serial port card, no mouse, a SoundBlaster 1.5, a clock card, and a 2 megabyte EMS expansion card (with 72 individual DIP chips on it)....with a 10MHz 8088.
Weird times.
Eventually, someone donated a board with an AMD 386SX-33, which I immediately overclocked to 40MHz. Things became a lot different after that.
but no 80186 (not that it matters much, but you started it :)).
It's true. Just an 8087 for companionship.
TIL: NEC V20 was 80188 compatible.
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The HP Palmtop IBM PC compatible clones also had very long battery life--on double AA batteries:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-hp-palmtop-pcs
> solar power
Tangential, but what happened to Intel Claremont, the solar-powered CPU? Did this project go anywhere or was it only a tech demo?
I use my boox max lumi as a secondary display daily for working in emacs. The eink is great for text/terminal use, the only issue I have is when i sometimes need to do any kind of mouse work (which, is basically never, when I use it for what I said above).
What I really want is a low power linux laptop that is not entirely without CPU/memory power, so I can program some simple things on it. I don't mind if it has _less_ power, I can use ssh for anything that is overly cpu-hungry.
Ive seen several devices that seem like they might suit my need, but I look at them for long enough and just won't pull the trigger. Either it seems overly much like a walled garden (like, I can program on the device, but it doesn't seem like a suitable spot to write blog posts in emacs for my blog or whatever), or its just too underpowered and I'm sure that 99% of the tools I use already won't work on it.
I wish I had the EE knowledge/confidence to start hacking on this kind of thing. I think its very doable; I was just looking at e.g. https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...
which is just cheap enough that I could see myself risking buying it without being sure that it will work with my other choices.
Nowadays, I feel like I should be able to run most of what I want on an android device that is built for power, and it should have a fairly long lasting battery because of its design; attach a trackpad, keyboard, and eink display, and my perfect device is here. I don't care if its not the thinnest device in the universe, a swappable battery (or, just load the thing with extra batteries) plus perhaps a portable solar charger would be amazing.
Some other comment mentioned the pinenote which was shown on https://fosstodon.org/@carbonatedcaffeine/114208672145631483 a month ago. Sounds almost too good to be true, but I haven't tried it myself
Pretty dang cool. Well done.
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.
I still use an n270 with OpenBSD, cwm, uxterm, mupdf and a bunch of cli/tui tools.
Chromebook with linux installed?
A bit clunkier compared to a clean ARM or AMD linux install, but still more or less useful.
Asus' eeePc was awesome!
I had an Eee PC 701. Pluses: the size was perfect. Minuses: everything else, from the CPU to the tiny drive to the tiny RAM to the keyboard to the trackpad was meh, at best.
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.
Check out GPD. I am typing this from a GPD Win Max and it's a lovely little x64 machine with 64 GB of RAM and a 7840U CPU (8 cores at 3.3 GHz) and ... it fits in a coat pocket. The battery life is okayish (~5 hours after 2 years?), but USB C charging means just buy extra battery packs.
That's super cool! Thanks for the idea.
This is awesome, only wish it was a 486DX2 with 4/8MB RAM instead, that would increase the possibilities of running more heavier operating systems, like Windows 95.
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.
So it's not quite that, but the Pocket 386 exists right now today, and is quite excellent!
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/a-few-weeks-with-the...
You can buy them off Aliexpress etc. quite easily
> 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.
There’s a video, too, but the framerate wasn’t usefully playable. I’ve seen worse, but you wouldn’t ever want to play it this way.
The idea of a laptop with an e-ink display running Linux and having days of battery life is really interesting.
To save others doing what I did there is an Android tablet like this called 'Daylight'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098318
There's also the MobiScribe Wave (https://mobiscribe.com/), a color e-ink Android tablet, with frontlighting, and excellent battery life. On standby, it lasts for weeks. I have it hooked up to my Bluetooth keyboard. It runs emacs, a web browser, and email client - plus all the usual e-reader apps.
(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 think the closest thing I've gotten to the Linux + E-Ink dream(for me at least) is the Pinenote with a bluetooth keyboard. It's been a surprisingly enjoyable portable device(nice wireless keyboard doesn't hurt either) and it's powerful enough to do some nice simple stuff, then disconnect they keyboard and it's back to being an book/newsfeed reader.
Oh, the Clockwork Pi is also interesting.
https://www.clockworkpi.com/
The irony of a retro computer with a web page that is unusable(can't click, scroll weird, ...) because too modern webdev :)
Man, I want this, but IBM AT level, 32-bits with at least a 386 and 8MB of RAM.
There were a bunch of those appearing on the various Chinese sites recently.
https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/pocket386-retro-dos-co...
Looks like someone found a good way to get rid of a bunch of new-old-stock embedded/industrial boards and/or SoCs that were sitting around in a warehouse somewhere in China.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40750371
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35995959
The IBM AT used an Intel 80286
The Original IBM AT used a 6Mhz 286, and then an 8Mhz 286, and then modified the ROMSs so you could not make a 6Mhz into an 8Mhz by swapping the crystal. Other vendors cranked up the speed to 10, 12, 16, 20 and finally 25Mhz.
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.
The AT was still the model for clones until the PCI bus came out. It's even in the names of devices and peripherals: ATX motherboard form factor, ATA (IDE) drive interface, etc.
This makes me wonder: Are there any solar-powered navigation computers? It would be cool to have an off-grid navigation computer that can load all openstreetmap tiles.
The Garmin 540/840/1040 bike computers have a solar option but it’s not sufficient to completely power the device. It just slows the drain by a few points.
reminded me of https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html
It would be really neat if the emulator had some kind of "escape mode" where it could jump to and run the native instruction set.
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.
Powered by ESP32, which reportedly uses archaic 40nm technology. Aren't there some good ARM microprocessors built with 5nm technology, which would consume comparable power?
The brand new rp2350 from Raspberry Pi is also made on 40nm. Microcontrollers are often on 40nm or 32nm processes, but those processes didn’t stop being updated twenty years ago.
Not with a radio, no
I love the idea of a full-size keyboard slate devices. The DevTerm is almost there, but my ideal would be the size of a TRS-80 model 100.
>100+ hours of battery life
you will spend 99 of those hours waiting for screen refresh (1/second).
> Note: if some videos won't play in Firefox, please try using Chrome.
No thanks.
Exactly my thought. The same answer goes for new plugins developed only for Chrome.
Thankfully plays on Firefox, but doesn't in Chrome on Android.
3 decades ago I did upgrade logistics for NMR labs using HP and Nixdorf based backends to run the machines. What amazed me was how the HP gui was X10. pre X10R4. They decided "good enough" and commercialised a species of interface with a trackball and keyboard, which at least in terms of GUI styling was 1:1 congruent with X10R1 as I saw it in 85 or so. I continue to notice this interface on Ultrasound and like, I guess having coded the FPGAs to work, they just stopped changing it.
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.
Goodisplay says "Although the refresh rate of monochrome e-paper displays is faster than that of color e-paper, we still recommend allowing at least a 180-second interval after completing a set of display updates. Frequent updates can negatively impact the lifespan of the ePaper."
https://www.good-display.com/news/80.html
So I guess playing Space Quest a lot will rapidly kill that screen.
Can you make one that emulates a PowerBook 100?
can you? There's a MAME driver in macprtb.cpp you could work off—might want a few hacks in your implementation which is nothing new to Mac emulation. also this: https://github.com/evansm7/pico-mac
I really like this design by John Calhoun (known to me originally for his game Glider, I think he posts on HN as well):
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.
Came here to say something similar. A laptop with a high quality transflective screen (e-ink is a touch too slow) that can run classic Mac OS with absurdly long battery life would be a nice little device.
Mini vMac runs wonderfully on an OLPC XO-1 if you build it from source.
Reminds me of playing SimCity and learning Turbo C on my IBM PC Convertible with its far inferior non-backlit monochrome display.
Interesting that they Sharpied-out all of the extraneous keys, except Windows.
It sounds like it would be an awesome portable terminal emulator. Are there any good terminal emulator applications for DOS? How is the Minix 2.0 experience if you go that route?
Telix was good, as was CKermit for DOS. Neither supports modern perversions like 256 colors, but they both support VT220 or color ANSI.
Procomm or Telix would likely run just fine in the DOS side. I don't know if Minicomm will build under Minix but I would certainly investigate it.
MS Kermit
Super cool. I wonder how this would work with one of those transflective LCDs, like the Sharp Memory thing they used in the Playdate.
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...
For a true prepper PC a RISC-V machine running Linux with these kinds of specs would be ideal. Even more cool would be a crank charger along with the solar panels.
Outfit it with a LORA modem capable of running one of those peer to peer LORA mesh text messaging protocols.
This can run my text editor and lisp interpreter I wrote in assembly. I really should get one of these.
This is an incredible project! For someone looking to build their own Evertop using this repo, are there any specific hardware schematics, component lists, or 3D print files included or planned to be shared in the future to help with replication?
Interesting hardware.
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.
This actually has some super cool field digital note taking applications, where one may be away from power for a long time and just needs a digital means of writing TXT files. Awesome work!!
While I love the work, it is more like an adaptation, I am quite certain there were no PS/2 keyboards back in XT days, rather the classical din pin one.
PS/2 keyboards are early 1990's.
I'm not even sure why you would point this out.
I'm also quite certain there were also no USB flash drives, SD card support, Wifi networking and e-ink displays in the early 1990s. It's not a replica in any way, it does not claim to be that. Just a cool compute device!
What does clone mean?
It means the author is fond of just making shit up.
"I built an XT 'clone' [that doesn't even target the same CPU as an XT]"
Clone meant, at least back in the day, that it was compatible with software written for the IBM XT. There were many clones with more ram, 3.5” disk drives, or better CPU (NEC V20) than the original IBM XT but they all ran MS DOS and WordPerfect and Accolade Test Drive and any other software you would expect so they were considered ‘XT clones’
Sure. I remember that marketplace very well.
And until a couple of days ago, I never heard anyone mention an "XT clone" as being an emulated 80186 on an ESP32 with almost none of the IO or expansion capabilities of an XT.
That appears to be a new usement of the term; an invention, if you will, or a perversion if you won't.
(I can emulate an XT with my pocket supercomputer. It's fun to play with that kind of thing sometimes. But to call it a "clone" is going too far.)
Surely that's Doom8088 rather than the original version if this thing truly emulates an XT level machine (or rather an 80186 CPU)?
How does it even work on an 80186? I thought Doom required a 386.
There's been some downports. They tend to be slow, some of them using things like rendering using 80x50 text modes in 16 colours to reduce the "pixel" count.
I recall trying a Wolfenstein 3-D downport and it was getting about 5 fps on a NEC V40 (80188-equivalent) at 8MHz.
Anyone know what keyboard that is and where I could get my hands on one?
Just the keyboard. Not the entire unit.
Fairly unrelated, but loading that repo's page is nearly 200MB... Was a bit surprised at that.
That's because there is a lot of videos on that page.
> Fairly unrelated, but loading that repo's page is nearly 200MB... Was a bit surprised at that.
We have more than 8 GB of RAM, TB of hard drive and GHz computing power. We are humans. We just don't care. If we can waste something, we waste it. /s
Well to be fair, bandwidth is one area that's still limited a lot of the time.
Just what George R.R. Martin could use if his actual XT ever went kaputski.
Wasn't he using a Kaypro running CP/M?
Every source I've seen says it's a DOS machine with WordStar 4.0. I could have sworn I saw that it was an XT-clasd machine, but I can't source that detail right now.
This is what portable computers should have been.
what's the rationale for x86? To run vintage software?
I would love an eink laptop like this but with ARM, modern ports and linux
I think because the PCEmulator on the low power esm32 chip supports DOS and ELKS is just as limited and there is much less software for it.
As an alternative to DOS in the PCemulator that's running you could use FreeDOS or a port of Linux. https://github.com/ESP32DE/Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground https://youtu.be/pj0a91vlcGo
While DOS is limited, you could port your most used tools or software to DOS or port them, there's a vim and emacs port, you can play interactive fiction, read e-books, program in Turbo Pascal 5.5/7.0, Turbo C / Borland C++ (1.x - 3.1), use hypertext, sqlite, markdown, perhaps use long filenames with FreeDOS or Calmira for windows 3.0?
> what's the rationale for x86? To run vintage software?
Sounds reasonable. In an off-grid situation, best to stick with software written before the mid-2000s.
Then search for Raspberry Pi laptop cases and go for the one that can hold your choice of eink display + driver?
It does seem a bit strange given the overall focus on power consumption and battery life. Surely emulation is a very heavy tax on the hardware? Imagine what it could do with software running natively.
Well, the creator chose to use a regular ESP32, which is Xtensa based, and is poorly suited for this type of application.
It's really weird anyways because the ESP32 fairly old nor as useful as something like the C6 which on paper could run Linux but without floating point.
How do I get one of these?
I love it!Well done.
Damn it looks so good. Great work buddy. kudos.
CTRL+F DOOM. I'm not disappointed.
Actually 100 hours is an understatement. It'll go at least 200 hours of constant active use on a single charge, even if you don't use power saving mode, and can easily get 500 hours or a lot more using power saving mode.
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