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This Website is hosted on an Casio fx-9750GII Calculator
- app4soft 5y agoTwitter thread.[0] [0] https://twitter.com/Manawyrm/status/1414901574267248643 https://twitter.com/Manawyrm/status/1414901574267248643
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoBetter response times than other websites I browse… maybe they should upgrade to Casios.
- asmos7 5y agodown for me.
- laurent92 5y agoI wonder whether it would be fast if it ran some ancient web technology, such as CGI, .Net frameworks for the web or Filemaker web.
- munk-a 5y agoI strongly suspect the webpage is entirely static and trying to run any sort of modern serverside framework would make it wail in protest - some simple dynamic elements using the native script might be doable though. It'd be neat to see if they could get a page counter up - just a dumb one that blindly increments the counter whenever any visit occurs.
- arkitaip 5y agoMaybe we should all skip cloud platfoms and CDNs and buy a bunch of Casios instead.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoHow many Casios can you fit in a U1 rack?
- Johnny555 5y agoThe calculator's dimensions are: 21.3 x 87.5 x 180.5mm A 1U rack comes in various depths, let's assume 1m (1000mm), and the width between rails is about 450mm. 1U is around 44mm in height. So in 1U, you could stack them 2 high, 5 wide, and 5 deep (this leaves a little wiggle room for cables and such), or 50 per 1U, or 2100 in a 42U full rack.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoHah! That’s production ready if you ask me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fsiefken 5y agowe should all upgrade to gemini on casios, not sure if the processor is powerful enough to run the opentls encryption. perhaps a beowulf cluster can be made
- valvar 5y agoHm, maybe posting this to HN wasn't the best idea...?
- Firerouge 5y agoMaybe we'll get a follow-up on hosting a distributed cluster of casios to handle global load balancing
- juanitolol 5y agolol
- marianov 5y agoAWS Casio as a service.
- pletnes 5y agoc4s?
- to11mtm 5y agoNawww, You'd want to call it Casiopeia (sic).
- TypeCaste 5y agoPerhaps vertically scaling this on a Casio FX-CG50PRIZM is an option?
- nyadesu 5y agoop just need to add some cache servers in front of it and it'll be fine, impressive
- midasuni 5y agoBack in my day it was a Beowulf cluster running on hot grits serving Natalie Portman pictures
- bguberfain 5y agoNot anymore
- m2com 5y agoSlow load, but after a minute it worked for me. Pretty cool!
- max1cc 5y agoIn case it goes down: https://archive.is/5a44i https://archive.is/5a44i
- bydo 5y agoWayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210712193555/http://fxip.as203478.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210712193555/http://fxip.as203...
- alecakin 5y agoDid this get the hug of death?
- munk-a 5y agoIt looks like it may have briefly - but it loaded great for me.
- Threeve303 5y agoThe calculator likely exploded
- robohoe 5y agoThe little engine that could(n't)
- mbroncano 5y agoIt seems to work!
- walrus01 5y agobased on the hostname, although the httpd isn't answering, it makes me wonder if they also made the calculator speak BGP and take a full ipv4/ipv6 BGP table. Somehow with the RAM requirements I doubt it.
- manawyrm 5y agolol! The IP stack does not have forwarding support, but I guess you could implement some rudimentary loopback announcement support.
- carlhjerpe 5y agoIs this Casio colocated in a Hetzner datacenter?
- da_big_ghey 5y agomaybe he has reverse proxy to house because no public ip with ports for hosting?
- carlhjerpe 5y agoI would argue it's not really hosted on the Casio then, since it's only static content the reverse proxy cache would hit 100% every time, except on TTL.
- gruez 5y agoMaybe it's just a forwarding setup with no caching?
- TravisHusky 5y agoIt is cheaper than AWS's Casio as a Service and for small sites you barely notice the difference.
- munk-a 5y agoThen again AWS's Casio as a Service is available in a HIPAA compliant form. Actually, HIPAA auditors would probably love a webserver running on a Casio since the hardware can be closely vetted and won't randomly change.
- aaron-santos 5y agoIf you use an an alt-CaaS you'll won't benefit from Infinidash integration, but then again you won't have the Infinidash configuration learning curve to deal with so it could still end up a net positive.
- tfehring 5y ago
- munk-a 5y agoAssuming Casios can run links or some custom browser - does anyone want to grab a snapshot of this page being rendered on their calculator to complete the circle?
- vletal 5y agoAccording to timestamps of comments here I came approx 12 minutes late. RIP Casio
- alias_neo 5y agoLoaded for me just now.
- recursivedoubts 5y agothis is like firing the death star at a plucky little pod racer
- ASalazarMX 5y ago"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in curiosity and one was suddenly silenced."
- nsxwolf 5y agoDoesn't this run on one of the CPUs Sega used in the Saturn or Dreamcast?
- opencl 5y agoNot quite the same CPU but they're all based on the SuperH ISA. The 32X and Saturn both had dual SH-2s, Dreamcast had an SH-4, and Casio uses SH-3 and SH-4. The Dreamcast SH-4 has an FPU but the Casio one doesn't.
- whizzter 5y agoSame as in the Dreamcast yes, albeit the Casio seems to be clocked far lower (29mhz in Casio vs 200mhz for DC). Also the memory seems a bit anemic at 60ish-kb vs 16mb main for the DC (+8mb videomem and 2mb audiomem). It was a fine CPU for the era with parallel instructions but also a fairly deep pipe compared to other contemporaries so it did best with a bit of hand tuning. (We worked on a DC game and Transform&Lighting loops needed hand optimizations iirc)
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 5y ago>29mhz in Casio It's extremely overclockable, though: http://pm.matrix.jp/ftune2e.html http://pm.matrix.jp/ftune2e.html
- H8crilA 5y agoIt's not any more. Please update the title.
- aftbit 5y agoThe author's blog has a lot of interesting projects, though I did not find a writeup on this one. https://tbspace.de/ https://tbspace.de/
- bikamonki 5y agoERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT
- drexlspivey 5y agohit ctrl + square root to reload
- pinacarlos90 5y agoThis calculator got me through college. I then passed it down to my brother and it lasted him through college also.
- ndesaulniers 5y agoTime for your brother to consider setting up a webserver on it! /s The TI 80 series were more popular in my college days, perhaps these Casio's were more popular in another time or region?
- stordoff 5y agoI think Casio calculators are quite popular in the UK - I used an fx570 through secondary school and university. It was the one recommended by my school, and then it was one of the three models (all Casio) allowed by my university[1]. I briefly had a TI83 for A-Level Further Maths, but I didn't use it much. The fx-9750 would have been usable at secondary school (though it's more powerful than what you really need), but it wasn't on my university's allowed list. [1] Currently you can use an fx 991, fx 115, or fx 570 for CS, and I pretty sure the list was the same whilst I was there - https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/calculators https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/calculators
- jhallenworld 5y agoWell Casios are better than TI calculators. My current favorite calculator is Casio ES-115 PLUS2 https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientific-Calculator/dp/B086Z79HXS/ref=asc_df_B086Z79HXS/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=459562603100&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10200270384879542086&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002000&hvtargid=pla-914898201055&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi... I like it because when you enter sin(pi/12) you get (sqrt(3)-1)/(2*sqrt(2)) in mathematical notation, which is really nice for a $16 calculator. Here I'm going to hurt TI: If you need a TI-84 or TI-89 for school, the place to get them cheap is shopgoodwill.com: https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Listings?st=ti-84%20plus&sg=&c=&s=&lp=0&hp=999999&sbn=false&spo=false&snpo=false&socs=false&sd=false&sca=false&caed=7/12/2021&cadb=7&scs=false&sis=false&col=0&p=1&ps=40&desc=false&ss=0&UseBuyerPrefs=true https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Listings?st=ti-84%20plus&sg=&c=...
- parsecs 5y agoCleaned url: https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientific-Calculator/dp/B086Z79HXS/ https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi... Thank you so much for pointing out fx-115ES PLUS2! I looked for a good hour yesterday trying to find an alternative to the fx-115ES PLUS (first edition) with the same features, after Casio discontinued the original. I'm honestly embarrassed that I had overlooked this... I do absolutely agree that Casio calculators are just wholly better than TI in general. Their menu driven interface is a game changer for me back in middle school. TI-36X Pro felt cumbersome and confusing, while fx-115ES was much more intuitive.
- halotrope 5y agoCorrection: was hosted on an Casio fx-9750GII Calculator.
- chefkoch 5y agono https?
- arthurcolle 5y agoSavage
- eric__cartman 5y agoyou need at least an HP Prime for that
- z3t4 5y agohttps is complicated and resource heavy (relative to plain http 1x).
- lovetocode 5y agoNext post: how I burned my Casio calculator.
- ghalvatzakis 5y agoCasio is on fire!!
- sleepy_keita 5y agoThe author seems to have their own AS for "experimentation purposes" https://tbspace.de/as203478tbspacenetworks.html https://tbspace.de/as203478tbspacenetworks.html https://bgp.he.net/AS203478 https://bgp.he.net/AS203478 https://www.peeringdb.com/net/10981 https://www.peeringdb.com/net/10981 I've always been interested in doing something like this, although it's prohibitively expensive for me, even for IPv6-only.
- bswinnerton 5y agoIt can be relatively inexpensive, depending on which RIR you’re using. There are providers like [Neptune Networks](https://neptunenetworks.org/ https://neptunenetworks.org/) or [Vultr](https://www.vultr.com/ https://www.vultr.com/) that you can peer with from a VPS so you don’t need to get “proper” IP transit in a datacenter.
- sleepy_keita 5y agoOh, interesting -- I assumed you had to have a membership to the RIR directly (APNIC in my case, which would have been upwards of 1000AUD/month). Hmm... Thanks!
- toast0 5y agoAPNICs info seems to show AUD 1180/year, not per month? Includes one ASN, one /24 on v4 and a /48 on v6. It's still significant, but not crazy.
- sleepy_keita 5y agoOh, you're right. 1180AUD / year + 500AUD sign-up fee.. Still a bit expensive. If I had a business use case for it I'd be able to justify it, but it's too much for a hobby, unfortunately.
- dannyw 5y agoThis actually doesn't seem that bad for a hobby (I'd be using this almost as a fee to help me learn more about networking). Does APNIC give out ASes for hobbyist and experimental use?
- mahathu 5y agoWhy did I click on this expecting a calculator out of all the possible servers would withstand HN's hug of death? Smart of the commenters here archiving it before it inevitably went down
- markzzerella 5y agoBecause static pages on a calculator likely to be more reliable and faster than whatever hipster stack is popular running on some VC funded pile of compute power across all of Amazon's datacenters.
- nvader 5y agoFWIW I still saw the link at #1, clicked it almost in exasperation after seeing it at the top of HN all day, and was pleasantly surprised to see it load. Bravo, little calculator.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- euroderf 5y agoMaybe it logs to a daisy wheel printer ?
- SirOibaf 5y agoLooks like the Casio is not web scale :)
- literallyaduck 5y agoThey just need to add a casio load balancer.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoThis is really cool, but these days I prefer to host on virtualized Casios so I can scale up if I need Casio FX perf or down if I need Casio Databank perf.
- akouri 5y agoNeeded this today, thank you.
- carrja99 5y agoNot anymore.
- mmmuhd 5y agoThis is really inspiring as I have been eyeing my smart electric utility meter as the perfect candidate for running my portofolio website.
- bob1029 5y agoMake sure you set your TTLs high enough to account for the occasional late meter reading.
- cto_of_antifa 5y agoDns record TTLs? Why?
- gumby 5y agoI'm kind of amazed that a calculator needs a processor as powerful as a SH4. If you had video out you could run Sega games on that thing.
- narrator 5y agoI have a soft spot in my heart for underpowered computers, but practically, I know this is kind of an unnatural fetish, and not really a healthy love. The little computer costs way more and consumes way more per watt than modern systems, and any minimal use case is better done via virtualization in a container on a more capable computer. Yet, the fetishism of all manner of obsolete, underpowered and wildly obsolete chip process technology remains!
- imoverclocked 5y agoI mean, for its normal load it probably consumes far less overall power to service this content than anything else you would replace it with. From the tech specs: Batteries: 4x AAA Battery life: 230h From a Google search+answer: Energizer's AAA battery has a capacity of 1250 milliamp hours, or 1.87 watt-hours So 4 of those can power the device for 230 hours ... that's about 32mW. For reference, a RaspberryPi 2b idles at > 1W.
- tyingq 5y agoInteresting. I still have a Jornada 680, which uses the Hitachi SH3 CPU (compared to this Casio's SH4). It came with Windows CE, but there was a Linux distro for it called Jlime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlime
- xwdv 5y agoWould an Apple Watch be a better place to host a website than a Casio?
- t8e56vd4ih 5y agopretty impressive for a guy who uses tabs!
- literallyaduck 5y agoIn 2030 I look forward to renting a casio for a web server instead and being happy about it.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoBy then, the screen will have almost 20% more pixels, the number of variables will be upgraded from 28 to 32, memory will be upgraded from 62kilobytes to 94kilobytes, and adjusted for inflation, it will still be the same price!
- fouc 5y agoNow I want to see a website hosted by my favorite graphing calculator, the one that comes with the best UX for operating on numbers - RPN (Reverse Polish Notation). HP-48G
- ronyeh 5y agoThanks for reminding me that I used to play Columns and other games on my HP during math class.
- normac2 5y agoNotice: this is written in fairly nicely-written C, not ASM with demoscene level micro-optimizations, like you might expect. Goes to show how much you can get out of hardware just by writing code sensibly in a native language (and native libs/tools, of course).
- Cullinet 5y agoC isn't in my mind close to the metal but potentially lets you be more sympathetic to the metal. Thanks for your drawing attention to this, I'm looking forward to reading.
- normac2 5y agoWell, at the very least it's close in that it's native compiled (and not in a very abstracted way like JIT languages mostly are).
- pjmlp 5y agoC like any other language, also has JITs and scripting implementations to chose from. WASM, MSIL, Tendra, TIMI are all examples of JIT/AOT implementation that have C (or C++) as part of their source languages.
- mvanaltvorst 5y ago> Goes to show how much you can get out of hardware just by writing code sensibly in a native language (and native libs/tools, of course). Personally, I find this a far less impressive demo of the SuperH SH-4 CPU than, say, Doom running on a graphical calculator. A http server (not https) simply opens sockets, writes a string, and closes the socket, a task which is usually purely I/O bound. Implement something basic like HTTPS (introduced in 1994) and watch this CPU grind to a halt.
- Uberphallus 5y agoI agree with the feeling, it's not really that impressive, but the HTTPS mention isn't accurate. Performance would be certainly lower, but remember the SH-4 was in the Dreamcast. You can buy some niche boards[0] with SH-4, and I assure you, they can run Debian and they do SSL just fine. [0]https://www.apnet.co.jp/product/superh/ https://www.apnet.co.jp/product/superh/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dleslie 5y agoFor comparison: the 32X and Saturn used SH2 processors.
- the_third_wave 5y agoLast year I bought I used TI for my daughter who needed it for school. I got her the oldest version, the one which takes AAA batteries and communicates with the outside world through a serial link. A project like this brings to mind the possibility of stuffing a Raspberry Pi Zero in the battery compartment, hooking it up to the school WiFi, using a terminal app on the calculator to communicate with the Pi and in that way voiding the whole reason of using these ancient beasts in the first place. I won't do this of course - she's there to learn other things besides refining the art of cheating [1] - but it would be a tempting hack. An even more elaborate hack would be to replace the guts of the thing with a Zero running a TI emulator as well as some more useful stuff like ssh. The possibilities are endless... so endless in fact that I'm fairly certain this has been done already, somewhere. [1] which in my days at school consisted of writing the translated works of Homer on a 10x10cm piece of paper, a good way to a) learn to write incredibly small and b) get those words to stick inside your head long enough so you don't actually need to consult the cheat "sheet" during the test.
- shakna 5y agoThe ESP-01 is smaller, cheaper, less battery heavy, and already speaks serial so it wouldn't be hard to integrate it, just for the WiFi... And at a quick look there's a bunch of TI<->Arduino stuff out there in the wild it should be easy.
- the_third_wave 5y agoThere are many ways to flay this hog, this is more of a thought experiment than a recipe for a TI-CH337. The ultimate hack would be to use a more modern version (with "high-res" screen) and replace/amend the guts with something which emulates the calculator - wabbitemu seems to work just fine [1] - but can also function in other ways. Add some key combination to switch functions and you have a mean lean cheatin' machine. [1] http://wabbitemu.org/ http://wabbitemu.org/
- db48x 5y agoReminds me of when I was in high school. I found a terminal emulator for my HP48G, built a serial cable to connect it to my 2400 baud modem. I was able to use it to check my email in physics class. Of course I was only able to do that once; the modem was three or four times the size of the calculator with lots of blinkenlights on it, and trailing a phone cable half way across the classroom isn’t very subtle.
- nikeee 5y agoThey also built a serial adapter that connects to a dial-up modem: https://youtu.be/epFX8K0dhdY https://youtu.be/epFX8K0dhdY And an IRC client: https://youtu.be/afkrucsMMrc https://youtu.be/afkrucsMMrc
- Cullinet 5y agoreason why we link bonuses to documentation weighted for responsibilities for business continuity. but we make junior devs break the back of the writing (long form not code comments) precisely to develop understanding and appreciation for the scope of inadvertent misunderstanding and errors. we paid overtime rates for sick days used to produce documentation until it was rather taken advantage of by post commit blow out hangovers leveraging the difficulty with getting really hard problems out of one's head following a real impasse - this encouraged a post mortem culture of celebration of heroic failures of increasingly marginal prowess, although I would have liked to keep the practice with a little bit more review or limit.
- noitpmeder 5y agoDoes this account just spew text? All of your prior comments are a mix of word soup and technical jargon.
- ant6n 5y agoBot got 172 karma somehow
- noitpmeder 5y agoother bots?
- a1369209993 5y agoReminder: when operating a bot, the profile about field needs to contain contact information, not more bot spew.
- Simplicitas 5y agoin case??
- 29athrowaway 5y agoWhen I got my TI-89 long time ago, I remember that the TI programming scene was very vibrant back then. Many game ports and all of sorts of interesting software.
- dng88 5y agoSeems software side quite clear. Not sure the hardware side. Is the usb power used to communicate with the host and run on that usb power. What is the other cable do? And how network work (other than the domain … wow)
- quickthrower2 5y agoImpressed the page opened (albeit after 10 seconds) for a high up HN post!
- pryelluw 5y agoI keep eyeing these calculators but can’t really find an excuse to buy it. But now . . .
- blhack 5y agoHow long until this is available as an AWS image?
- aaccount 5y agoI think you might have killed the calculator by posting it here. LOL
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- baybal2 5y ago8 years ago I worked for an LED lights company which had a bright idea to put whole ucLinux + webserver to be ran on a microcontroller on an LED light to put a claim on just how smart they are, and that now they are "an Internet company" like as if the dotcom bubble hasn't happened. So it was a $1 LED light board + $32 some old, and exotic MCU setup with own external memory, power supply, etc (even by 2013, ucLinux was already "very dead" without any new MCU support for 8-7 years.) Aside from most extreme size limitations for the HTML UI, I was genuinely surprised just how snappy it was.
- publicola1990 5y agoIts a great mystery to me why American students have to buy expensive programmable calculators for course work. I vaguely remember reading that it is the result of lobbying by calculator manufacturers. In my country even undergraduate science/engineering students dont need a programmable calculator. Some undergraduate programs like CS don't need any type of calculator.
- sgt 5y agoThey are not expensive: https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator-White/dp/B00154GSQA https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GII-Graphing-Calculator-...
- publicola1990 5y agoMore than the quantum of the expense, I am questioning the need. Couple of hundred dollars on an unnecessary expense is still wastage.
- sgt 5y agoBut for Calculus (part of CS) you need a graphing calculator.
- Jolter 5y agoYou don’t, unless the teaching staff decide to include a lot of numerical work in exams. Which I don’t know why they would do. I would presume that a calculus course would teach you algebraic methods that you work out on paper. In Swedish engineering schools, graphing calculators are banned from exams in almost all subject.
- ithinkso 5y agoWhy? I've done calculus and analysis in college and no one has ever used a calculator, I'm not even sure what you would need one for, can you give me an example (seriously curious) The only time I remember needing a calculator in my entire education was some circuit theory because those Thevenins and Nortons get real ugly real fast (but even then you only need +,-,*,/)
- tvirosi 5y agoFunny that it seems to not have been affected at all by HN's hug of death.
- pellias 5y agoI can imagine if the site own who is stuck in Mars with a Casio fx-9750GII will attempt to use it to host a web page to communicate back to earth or something.
- nudpiedo 5y agoThat makes me think that a solar interntet is possible, perhaps routers and less intensive webpages may start moving if there was a value proposition for their owners. Sure it's not a whole solution just yet, but it's a start.
- buu709 5y agoLowtech Magazine has a mirror of their site hosted on a laptop and fully powered by solar that's been running for a few years now.
- James-Livesey 5y agoShame, because I only have an fx-970G Plus which can't run custom code besides BASIC. Otherwise I'd join you in this calculator-net! Awesome project, though
- thereddaikon 5y agoSeems the CPU from a Dreamcast is a little overkill for a greyscale graphing calculator isn't it?
- rs999gti 5y agoI subscribed it to an uptime monitor - https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/fxip.as203478.net.html https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/fxip.as203478.net.html
- avgDev 5y agoI'm not really proud of this but my 1st step into programming was writing programs to calculate things for me on the TI in high school. At some point teachers made us delete programs in front of them before major tests.....someone else wrote a program that would simulate deleting programs and showed an empty screen which meant all programs were deleted. I wasn't a dumb kid but I always felt like why just not program those things and have more free time? I guess I was always a dev.