My own humble e-paper projects:
https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/
I can't really see a device like this getting used super heavily every day, so expecting it to still be usable from time to time for a few years seems reasonable to me.
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...
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.
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.
They rather put their phones in a drawer because the battery isn't good anymore.
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.
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.
This is a "solved problem" by the mainstream retail PC manufacturers...
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.
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).
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
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.
like paper? :D
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.
Just jailbreak your eink Kindle?
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!)
They keyboard is not from a laptop. It's a stand-alone PS/2 keyboard that I removed from its original enclosure and installed in the 3d printed enclosure for this computer. I get them from https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=561534245819&skuId=52612... (the "KJW240/10寸PS/2圆口（线长140cm" option). I cut the cord down to about 35cm, since the original cords are way too long, and crimp on a PH2.0 plug which plugs into the motherboard internally. Don't know whether or not you can buy this keyboard outside China. Maybe it's sold on AliExpress too. I tried out a lot of different keyboards before choosing this one. My criteria was pretty hard to meet: must have windows and menu keys, must have left and right shift keys (some keyboards actually don't have a right shift key!), must have both delete and backspace keys (some keyboards don't have a delete key), must have print screen scroll lock, numlock, number keypad (activated by numlock), pause/break, insert keys. Not many miniature modern keyboards actually have all those. It had to be small enough to fit on this computer but big enough to be able to type on fairly naturally. And it had to have pretty low power consumption. This keyboard takes about 6-7mA. Many keyboards I tried took between 30-40mA, more than the CPU itself. The thing I dislike most about this keyboard is the home key being between the quote and enter keys, and the up arrow key being where the right shift key should be. That's a really unfortunate design problem. But its a lot better than a lot of keyboards, and its something I was able to get pretty used to after a few days of typing. Still, I do plan to build my own keyboard to replace this in the future, one with a processor that sleeps between keystrokes so it can consume less than 1mA on average, and that has a standard key layout.
Since you can also plug in a PS/2 keyboard of your choice on the right side of the device, I had to consider the situation where someone plugs in an older keyboard that doesn't have the windows and menu keys. In that case they can use the F11 key to replace the windows key, and the F12 key to replace the menu key, as these two keys were not present on many keyboards and not used by software from the DOS era either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mostly just curious about minimizing energy usage due to wifi.
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.
I had an XT in high school and used to hit up the BBSs at 2400 baud watching each character light up on my green monochrome display. It was glorious!
It also sort of sets the expectations for the sloooow screen.
Tangential, but what happened to Intel Claremont, the solar-powered CPU? Did this project go anywhere or was it only a tech demo?
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.
My ideal setup before eyeing the e-ink space was a linux-based netbook and occasional internet access to offload heavy compute to powerful servers. I could see using this sort of setup in a similar fashion.
Asus' eeePc was awesome!
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.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/a-few-weeks-with-the...
You can buy them off Aliexpress etc. quite easily
There's a 2:30 video of Wolfenstein 3D gameplay on the linked README page.
To save others doing what I did there is an Android tablet like this called 'Daylight'
(Yes, I'm aware there are several other Android e-readers. The Wave has the unique combination of top-end handwriting functionality with waterproofing.)
https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/pocket386-retro-dos-co...
IBM PS2s went for 10Mhz 1 Wait state, and 10Mhz zero wait states.
A 25Mhz 286 rivaled a 386 DX in speed in benchmarks, but was left in the just for any 32-bit apps. I had a 20Mhz 286 with 4mb of ram, but only for DOS programs such as CA-General Ledger.
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.
you will spend 99 of those hours waiting for screen refresh (1/second).
No thanks.
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.
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.
https://www.good-display.com/news/80.html
So I guess playing Space Quest a lot will rapidly kill that screen.
Interesting that they Sharpied-out all of the extraneous keys, except Windows.
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...
Outfit it with a LORA modem capable of running one of those peer to peer LORA mesh text messaging protocols.
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.
PS/2 keyboards are early 1990's.
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!
I recall trying a Wolfenstein 3-D downport and it was getting about 5 fps on a NEC V40 (80188-equivalent) at 8MHz.
Just the keyboard. Not the entire unit.
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
I would love an eink laptop like this but with ARM, modern ports and linux
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?
Sounds reasonable. In an off-grid situation, best to stick with software written before the mid-2000s.
