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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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.)
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?
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.
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...
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!
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
The industry got a lot better at making laptops thinner and screens bigger. Users liked thinner laptops with bigger screens.
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.
Killed UMPC, then killed by iPhone/iPad.
It's tablet cases with bluetooth keyboard now.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rats. Those are good points and you're right. I do so want that, though.
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 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
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.
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
It's called a TrackPoint. ;-)
> 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?
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.
but no 80186 (not that it matters much, but you started it :)).
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I still use an n270 with OpenBSD, cwm, uxterm, mupdf and a bunch of cli/tui tools.
> 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.
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?
Not with a radio, no
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 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 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
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 :)
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.)
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?
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
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.
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...
This can run my text editor and lisp interpreter I wrote in assembly. I really should get one of these.
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!
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!!
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.
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.
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
>100+ hours of battery life
you will spend 99 of those hours waiting for screen refresh (1/second).
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.
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.
Just what George R.R. Martin could use if his actual XT ever went kaputski.
This is what portable computers should have been.
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.
Damn it looks so good. Great work buddy. kudos.
I love it!Well done.
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?
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.
CTRL+F DOOM. I'm not disappointed.