A few months ago, we rolled out an updated Hackaday, a badly needed new layout replacing the HTML and CSS that had remained unchanged since 2004. Of course a few people didn’t like change and complained about slow load times. We’ve experienced a slightly slower load time as well, so we’ll just wait until the year 2020 when our computers are many times faster and our Internet is provided by Google Fiber. Until then, our pokey battlestations and vintage computers can still check out a few classic hacks on our retro site. Here’s a few retro successes – Hackaday readers who pulled out their old tech and loaded up the retro site – that have come in over the past weeks and months.
The idea behind a Macbook Air, a few Sony Vaios, and a whole bunch of EEEs and other netbooks – sacrificing expandability and horsepower for an extremely small portable computer – isn’t a new one. Ultraportables have always found their niche, whether it’s a TRS-80 (like the one with a new motherboard we saw earlier this week) being carried into a war zone, a nifty Powerbook duo being used a fashion accessory, or a Macbook Air representing the lowest rung of a product lineup.
Ultraportables also have another thing going for them: they’re small enough to fit in a box in a basement and be forgotten for 20 years. Where a huge ATX tower housing a 60 MHz 486 is a prime candidate for a yard sale or a trip to the recycling center, an ultaportable can sit forgotten for years.
We’ve gotten two retro challenge submissions over the past few weeks. First up is [Curtis] with his Toshiba Libretto 100CT. It’s got a 133 MHz Pentium and 64 MB of RAM. [Curtis] had a bit of a challenge getting his teensy laptop online; he ended up salvaging a networking card from a Netgear MR314 wireless router and plugging it in to the PCMCIA slot. Getting the driver onto the machine was a pain, but after configuring the router as an access server and setting up a terminal connection he was able to get his tiny box on the web.
Next up is [Eugenio], again with a Libretto, this time a CT50. A capable machine from the dawn of the Pentium era, [Eugenio] is running Windows 95 and Netscape Communicator 4. There’s also an oldish Sony Vaio Picturebook, an even tinier ultraportable from the turn of the century.
That’s all for now, but if you’ve got a retro submission to send in, give us a shout over on the Hackaday tip line.
Filed under: classic hacks
