Old Vintage Computing Research

I like Sun Ray laptops. They make surprisingly useful thin clients. Here, going from right to left, I'm playing Quake on my Solaris UltraBook IIi while it serves a Sun Ray session via Sun Ray Server Software (SRSS) to my silver Sun Ray 2N in the middle, and on my Accutech Gobi on the left I'm root. Wait, what? Root on a thin client?

Let's rewind a little.

In the post on our recently resurrected fork of Dreamcast Linux, I mentioned the NetBSD NFS server providing basically all of its persistent storage. A few days into the development work I started hearing a weird whine coming from the server room and sure enough the NFS server had a bad fan — in fact, the only fan cooling the entire 1U system. That means it's time ... for another Refurb Weekend!

Today we're adding TLS 1.3 to the one and only web browser on a 36MHz MIPS handheld running Magic Cap, the most unique mobile operating system from the most influential startup you never heard of. But before we do, a thank-you to Scott and Barbara Knaster: Scott, who is of course well known for his Macintosh books and his work at Alphabet-Google, also worked at General Magic as a technical writer. Barbara, his wife, wrote this very complete third-party book on Presenting Magic Cap — apparently the very first! — and all the cool things users could do with it, from basic E-mail and contacts (there's a reason why there's a cloud downtown, long before the term was fashionable) all the way to building forms and interfaces with the Magic Hat in construction mode. (One demonstration is making an E-mail form for lunch orders. You send it to people, they fill it out and send it back. It's all supported by the operating system.) It also includes a look at tinker mode, letting you steal the painting from the hallway and put it in your office behind the desk, or change the pictures on the doors. All this was possible without writing a line of code: as she concluded at the end of the book, "Magic Cap has great potential to expand and enrich the way people communicate." It sure did. Thanks, Barbara and Scott!

Hello, visitor to my house. Let me show you around my workspace. On my desk is a phone, a Rolodex, a name card (my desk needs to know), a note pad, and a datebook, with a couple things like stationery and a calculator in the drawers. In the office there's also a clock, an inbox and outbox, and a filecabinet. The web browser hangs on the wall. Doesn't yours?

Pop quiz: what classic brand of laptop is this?

I'll give you another hint.

Bright-red TrackPoint and mouse button trim, classic keyboard font, IBM logo on the top. It's a ThinkPad ... right?

Well, obviously someone on IBM's design team wanted you to think so. But turn it on and it itself announces it's not a ThinkPad:

Say hello to the RISC ThinkPad that's not a ThinkPad, the IBM WorkPad z50.