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?

> 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.

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".

There are a lot of 'forever devices' currently touching money in major financial institutions.

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.

> 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.

Software and battery, I reckon, are the mobile phone arena's area for disruption.

> 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...

> 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).

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.

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?

The Quark was discontinued in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark

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.

The latency from keypress to screen is 0.3 seconds for the first keypress, and about 0.4 seconds for all keypresses after that, until the next pause in typing.

This device is not, of course, intended to be able to perform modern functions that are required for modern office work. Its goal is to never run out of power, and its design tries to prioritize that at the expense of everything else, including features and performance. Because for anyone that loves computers as much as I do, a computer that will power up and provide a virtually unlimited amount of software, games, programming and software development options, and connectivity is better than a more modern and faster computer that won't turn on because it has no power. This computer can run for 500-1000 hours using power saving mode, and 200 hours without power saving mode. And with the built in solar panel, there should be ample opportunities to recharge it (or just run it directly off sunlight instead of using the batteries) before it the batteries run down. In a situation where people have to adjust to living in the long term without electricity, modern office computing is unlikely to be required, nor will there be any Internet. But in that situation, I still want to have a computer that I can use to do pretty much anything. This gives me that.

Rats. Those are good points and you're right. I do so want that, though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Still, it's not emulating an XT. XT is a very specific PC configuration. Maybe they just wanted to emphasize that it was ancient.

A bit clunkier compared to a clean ARM or AMD linux install, but still more or less useful.

Asus' eeePc was awesome!

The irony of a retro computer with a web page that is unusable(can't click, scroll weird, ...) because too modern webdev :)

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 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.

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.

Mini vMac runs wonderfully on an OLPC XO-1 if you build it from source.

What does clone mean?

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.

Well to be fair, bandwidth is one area that's still limited a lot of the time.

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.

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.