5 ms·

I bet if somebody held a gun to my head, and I was at least allowed to dial in via modem to a *nix server with node.js on it - I could probably do my current jo

by cr0sh 8y ago

I bet if somebody held a gun to my head, and I was at least allowed to dial in via modem to a *nix server with node.js on it - I could probably do my current job, to a certain bare-bones level... ...using my TRS-80 Model 100. Don't get me wrong - it would be a nightmare and no fun, and some things just wouldn't be possible. Though that's definitely not what the author had in mind...

stcredzero 8y ago
Someone needs to make a modern day equivalent of a Model 100. By that, I mean a highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life. The first programming job I was ever paid for, I did a large part of dialed in through a modem over landlines. Emacs was fantastic for that! (Because it's an OS masquerading as an editor.)
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  iPad Pro with a Brydge keyboard? https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/12/brydge-pro-keyboard/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/12/brydge-pro-keyboard/ The OS has a lot of limitations on doing local development work, but if you're connecting to a remote server you get a great quality screen and remarkably long battery life. Apple lists "Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music." Keyboard has its own battery (default connection is bluetooth, you can use a USB-C cable if that's not reliable enough). It's not clear to me if it can use its battery to charge the iPad or not. Either way, you can always carry a USB-C battery pack to extend the iPad's life even further.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    I have an iPad mini with a Microsoft folding keyboard that I rather like. I guess I could buy a really stout Otter case with my iPad mini and refresh the battery (getting old) and it would serve fairly well in that role. The thing about the Model 100, was it was pretty robust. Not mil-spec, but pretty darn good for a consumer device. I've read about it being used by researchers someplace like Antarctica. iPads are pretty good that way, but they do feel like a luxury device. I'd like to see more "consumer-level stout" devices. Give me plastic: much more robustness without added weight, and let me just not worry about knocking the thing around.
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      I actually like the "put a case on it" approach for robustness. It lets the devices be smaller, while leaving the degree of protection and bulkiness up to individual users. Case in point, I have a very slim case on my iPhone SE and tend not to drop it, but a lot of people I know with larger phones put the 2-layer rubber + plastic Otter style cases on them because they get dropped a lot. Others have smaller or no cases, but use pop-sockets and finger loops stuck on the back to make them grippable. On the iPad side of things you have options like the Rugged Book Go from Zagg: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/07/ipad-ipad-pro-get-new-cases-from-zagg-with-rugged-book-go-slim-book-go-messenger-folio https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/07/ipad-ipad-pro-get... Apple's phones have turned into absurdly priced luxury items, but the $800 starting price for an 11" iPad Pro feels pretty reasonable for what it is. EDIT - admittedly the hardware is overkill for running terminal sessions, something more like a Chromebook would be a cheaper fit if the battery life and screen were of similar quality
  - dwild 8y ago
    I wouldn't call a 10 hours battery life as an "endless battery life". On my ASUS Transformer Book T100, which is a full Windows 10 device, I had a battery life of about 10 hours and I didn't called that endless yet.
- heywire 8y ago
  I used an Acer C720 Chromebook as a remote terminal for quite some time. Eventually, though, I could no longer resist the urge to put a full blown Linux distro on it though :)
- ams6110 8y ago
  > Someone needs to make a modern day equivalent of a Model 100. By that, I mean a highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life. They do. They are called Chromebooks.
  - 0815test 8y ago
    Chromebooks suck. Just buy a cheap Windows laptop (and most recent models are going for the Chromebook-like "ultrabook" form factor anyway, even at the low end) and put lightweight Linux on it. You don't really get better specs for the price if you go the Chromebook route, and the whole way they're setup makes them pointless toys. (...No, I'm not going to look for the correct custom firmware for whatever my model of Chromebook happens to be, or put up with a machine that will wipe its storage unless I hit the right key combo as it boots! Again, that's hardly a marker of a professionally-built device!)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - isostatic 8y ago
      I got my mother-in-law a chromebook 2+ years ago. Haven't had a single support call since then, until she came round to stay and wanted to connect to our wifi to watch netflix. This didn't happen with a cheap windows laptop, and likely wouldn't have happened with a roll-your-own linux laptop. A chromebook isn't for me, or you, but it's great for parents/inlaws.
      - smiley1437 8y ago
        If you need to manage a fleet of machines for tech-challenged staff, Chromebooks using the Chrome management license is quite amazing, if imperfect in some ways. Set Kiosk-mode for all the machines and if a user has a problem, close the lid and open again, its working again. Need everyone to have a new tab in the browser? Update in the management and boom, everyone has it. Of course, the usage case assumes the users will do everything on the cloud using Chrome but that's surprisingly usable these days for non-tech users. The license is really cheap for non profits (like $30) but is about $150 for regular businesses. It seems like quite an add-on for a $300 Chromebook but it really turns end-user computing fleet management into almost a set-it-and-forget it appliance.
- retzkek 8y ago
  > highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life Most chromebooks fit this bill nicely. Pixelbook is fantastic if you also want a premium hardware experience and native ability to run a linux environment locally.
- luminiferous 8y ago
  For the first year or so of my job, I actually used a chromebook to SSH into my work desktop to do work remotely. (I'm a Googler and they were pushing new hires to try the chromebook over the more traditional macbook/thinkpad.) It was fantastic! The chromebook itself basically does nothing so the battery life is absurd, 10-12 hours easy. The chromebook starts up really fast because, again, the machine itself does almost nothing. It's certainly nothing like the portability or the stupid long battery life of a TRS-80, but it's a step in that direction. I later swapped to a macbook because the chromebook kept dying. In that 1 year period, I went through 3 chromebooks, which all ran into some kind of memory corruption or thermally-induced restart issue. It was the HP 13 inch chromebook, which I will be avoiding like the plague in the future. I still really like the chromebook battery life and the general "very lightweight portal to the internet" kind of paradigm, though.
  - phjesusthatguy3 8y ago
    What were you using for an SSH client? I just started to try using a Chromebook for everything and I really dislike the Google SSH client, but I could probably get used to it.
- fsagx 8y ago
  The OLPC gizmo from the mid 2000s was pretty close. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO A kind neighbor gave one to my kids. It had no games, so they were not really interested. I thought it was great! Super long battery life, great wifi reception with the external antennae, very ruggedized. It had some fork of Fedora iirc. I kept it in the van. There was a lot of free wifi in those days. Plenty good to ssh to a screen session while out-and-about.
  - watersb 8y ago
    We had one for each of our two kids at the ranch for a while. The Wifi range in those things was insane.
- vokep 8y ago
  There's got to be a way...Basically just a pure ssh client, thats all, no OS, nothing else, just ssh on whatever most minimal cpu can run it, a keyboard, and a screen. I guess it isn't considered important because we all have phones most likely charged, but still, it would be nice
wvenable 8y ago
I think it's the difference between possible and viable. I mean I have plenty of devices that are possible to work on but not really very viable. But, like the author, it's surprising how well you can get by. I've done useful work on my 8.4" tablet with a keyboard and remoted into a server.
tluyben2 8y ago
Besides web browsing I could potentially do a lot of my work on an early 80s machine. Even a non connected one would mostly do fine. I would need two of them at least for coding (I had 2 of them in the 80s as well for coding; crashing is normal as there is no protection when you mess up, and booting is fast but still a hassle, so two or more machines with a monitor switch was the faster solution) but I would get quite far given a bit of patience. It is insane how slow these machines were compared to what we have now, but with some effort, people get to run stuff like Symbos[1] on them and for some jobs that works. Web browsing is just quite impossible: many html pages do not even fit in memory, let alone allowing rendering. Solutions are sticking a Pi in the cartridge port that sends lynx rendered pages for instance, but that is cheating. So then a modem to a linux machine would be the better option. [1] http://www.symbos.de/ http://www.symbos.de/

by cr0sh 8y ago

stcredzero 8y ago

Someone needs to make a modern day equivalent of a Model 100. By that, I mean a highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life. The first programming job I was ever paid for, I did a large part of dialed in through a modem over landlines. Emacs was fantastic for that! (Because it's an OS masquerading as an editor.)

wlesieutre 8y ago
iPad Pro with a Brydge keyboard? https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/12/brydge-pro-keyboard/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/12/brydge-pro-keyboard/ The OS has a lot of limitations on doing local development work, but if you're connecting to a remote server you get a great quality screen and remarkably long battery life. Apple lists "Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music." Keyboard has its own battery (default connection is bluetooth, you can use a USB-C cable if that's not reliable enough). It's not clear to me if it can use its battery to charge the iPad or not. Either way, you can always carry a USB-C battery pack to extend the iPad's life even further.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I have an iPad mini with a Microsoft folding keyboard that I rather like. I guess I could buy a really stout Otter case with my iPad mini and refresh the battery (getting old) and it would serve fairly well in that role. The thing about the Model 100, was it was pretty robust. Not mil-spec, but pretty darn good for a consumer device. I've read about it being used by researchers someplace like Antarctica. iPads are pretty good that way, but they do feel like a luxury device. I'd like to see more "consumer-level stout" devices. Give me plastic: much more robustness without added weight, and let me just not worry about knocking the thing around.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    I actually like the "put a case on it" approach for robustness. It lets the devices be smaller, while leaving the degree of protection and bulkiness up to individual users. Case in point, I have a very slim case on my iPhone SE and tend not to drop it, but a lot of people I know with larger phones put the 2-layer rubber + plastic Otter style cases on them because they get dropped a lot. Others have smaller or no cases, but use pop-sockets and finger loops stuck on the back to make them grippable. On the iPad side of things you have options like the Rugged Book Go from Zagg: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/07/ipad-ipad-pro-get-new-cases-from-zagg-with-rugged-book-go-slim-book-go-messenger-folio https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/07/ipad-ipad-pro-get... Apple's phones have turned into absurdly priced luxury items, but the $800 starting price for an 11" iPad Pro feels pretty reasonable for what it is. EDIT - admittedly the hardware is overkill for running terminal sessions, something more like a Chromebook would be a cheaper fit if the battery life and screen were of similar quality
- dwild 8y ago
  I wouldn't call a 10 hours battery life as an "endless battery life". On my ASUS Transformer Book T100, which is a full Windows 10 device, I had a battery life of about 10 hours and I didn't called that endless yet.
heywire 8y ago
I used an Acer C720 Chromebook as a remote terminal for quite some time. Eventually, though, I could no longer resist the urge to put a full blown Linux distro on it though :)
ams6110 8y ago
> Someone needs to make a modern day equivalent of a Model 100. By that, I mean a highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life. They do. They are called Chromebooks.
- 0815test 8y ago
  Chromebooks suck. Just buy a cheap Windows laptop (and most recent models are going for the Chromebook-like "ultrabook" form factor anyway, even at the low end) and put lightweight Linux on it. You don't really get better specs for the price if you go the Chromebook route, and the whole way they're setup makes them pointless toys. (...No, I'm not going to look for the correct custom firmware for whatever my model of Chromebook happens to be, or put up with a machine that will wipe its storage unless I hit the right key combo as it boots! Again, that's hardly a marker of a professionally-built device!)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - isostatic 8y ago
    I got my mother-in-law a chromebook 2+ years ago. Haven't had a single support call since then, until she came round to stay and wanted to connect to our wifi to watch netflix. This didn't happen with a cheap windows laptop, and likely wouldn't have happened with a roll-your-own linux laptop. A chromebook isn't for me, or you, but it's great for parents/inlaws.
    - smiley1437 8y ago
      If you need to manage a fleet of machines for tech-challenged staff, Chromebooks using the Chrome management license is quite amazing, if imperfect in some ways. Set Kiosk-mode for all the machines and if a user has a problem, close the lid and open again, its working again. Need everyone to have a new tab in the browser? Update in the management and boom, everyone has it. Of course, the usage case assumes the users will do everything on the cloud using Chrome but that's surprisingly usable these days for non-tech users. The license is really cheap for non profits (like $30) but is about $150 for regular businesses. It seems like quite an add-on for a $300 Chromebook but it really turns end-user computing fleet management into almost a set-it-and-forget it appliance.
retzkek 8y ago
> highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life Most chromebooks fit this bill nicely. Pixelbook is fantastic if you also want a premium hardware experience and native ability to run a linux environment locally.
luminiferous 8y ago
For the first year or so of my job, I actually used a chromebook to SSH into my work desktop to do work remotely. (I'm a Googler and they were pushing new hires to try the chromebook over the more traditional macbook/thinkpad.) It was fantastic! The chromebook itself basically does nothing so the battery life is absurd, 10-12 hours easy. The chromebook starts up really fast because, again, the machine itself does almost nothing. It's certainly nothing like the portability or the stupid long battery life of a TRS-80, but it's a step in that direction. I later swapped to a macbook because the chromebook kept dying. In that 1 year period, I went through 3 chromebooks, which all ran into some kind of memory corruption or thermally-induced restart issue. It was the HP 13 inch chromebook, which I will be avoiding like the plague in the future. I still really like the chromebook battery life and the general "very lightweight portal to the internet" kind of paradigm, though.
- phjesusthatguy3 8y ago
  What were you using for an SSH client? I just started to try using a Chromebook for everything and I really dislike the Google SSH client, but I could probably get used to it.
fsagx 8y ago
The OLPC gizmo from the mid 2000s was pretty close. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO A kind neighbor gave one to my kids. It had no games, so they were not really interested. I thought it was great! Super long battery life, great wifi reception with the external antennae, very ruggedized. It had some fork of Fedora iirc. I kept it in the van. There was a lot of free wifi in those days. Plenty good to ssh to a screen session while out-and-about.
- watersb 8y ago
  We had one for each of our two kids at the ranch for a while. The Wifi range in those things was insane.
vokep 8y ago
There's got to be a way...Basically just a pure ssh client, thats all, no OS, nothing else, just ssh on whatever most minimal cpu can run it, a keyboard, and a screen. I guess it isn't considered important because we all have phones most likely charged, but still, it would be nice

wvenable 8y ago

I think it's the difference between possible and viable. I mean I have plenty of devices that are possible to work on but not really very viable. But, like the author, it's surprising how well you can get by. I've done useful work on my 8.4" tablet with a keyboard and remoted into a server.

tluyben2 8y ago

Besides web browsing I could potentially do a lot of my work on an early 80s machine. Even a non connected one would mostly do fine. I would need two of them at least for coding (I had 2 of them in the 80s as well for coding; crashing is normal as there is no protection when you mess up, and booting is fast but still a hassle, so two or more machines with a monitor switch was the faster solution) but I would get quite far given a bit of patience. It is insane how slow these machines were compared to what we have now, but with some effort, people get to run stuff like Symbos[1] on them and for some jobs that works. Web browsing is just quite impossible: many html pages do not even fit in memory, let alone allowing rendering. Solutions are sticking a Pi in the cartridge port that sends lynx rendered pages for instance, but that is cheating. So then a modem to a linux machine would be the better option. [1] http://www.symbos.de/ http://www.symbos.de/