

Ask HN: Wireless text-mode thin client? - GeoJawDguJin

There are a lot of devices floating around these days (iPod Touch, eeepc, everything in between) that make it a lot more convenient to get distracted by the internet. However, for years now I've wanted to see a more practical type of device, that takes advantage of the useful aspects of the internet while making distractions as inconvenient as possible.<p>The eeepc is light enough and cheap enough, but too small to type on comfortably. Normal-sized machines tend to have a lot of expensive and unnecessary hardware overhead. Both extremes have fairly pointless tradeoffs. What I'm looking for is a comfortable quality keyboard attached to a very basic display (say, 640x480, monochrome, low pixel density), and a CPU just powerful enough to support an SSH connection. In other words, I want a VT100 that you can fold up and put in your backpack. (By the way, the whole thing should be ruggedized, in case I drop it, and cheap, in case it gets lost or stolen.)<p>I haven't seen such a device on the market but I'm sure it's feasible to build, and it'd be so much nicer than lugging around a full-blown laptop. If some obscure company is selling it, could you point me towards their home page? If it would be easier to build it from scratch, could you give me some hints for that? (If one of you has a company that could manufacture these things, that'd be great too, but I won't hold my breath for miracles ;)
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RobGR
I don't know where you could get something like that these days.

However, TI used to make a real portable terminal:

[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/ti-
tymshare-100/...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/ti-
tymshare-100/index.html)

That one is considerably larger than the smallest models. The smallest onse
were about the size of an eeepc, but thicker, had a built in modem instead of
an acoustic coupler, and a thermal printer so you could print out a transcript
of your session on receipt style paper.

I am not old of enough to have ever used one, but I once saw a couple of the
smaller ones made for sale at the Austin Goodwill Computer Works.

For your purposes, I would get an old, small laptop such as a Compaq Aero and
install a simple, text-only linux on it.

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noonespecial
Just pack a usb (or bluetooth) keyboard along with your eeepc and change
/etc/inittab to start in level 3 (text mode).

