Well.
First of all, my mother language is not English, so I wish to apologise for the mistakes and typos you'll find in this new thread of mine...
One thing that I'm sure is that many of you know the HPC world for years. Many, if not all of you, know of this little electronic devices since their beginning, so you did not experience the shock that some newcomers like me felt the first time we saw a device that we've only seen in movies, and thought that those things were nothing but very well done props... For decades...
Until we realize that they were more than real.
Social media usually is the culprit for us tech lovers to fall in love with this little puppies, overall because of the sci-fi look of them, and because we are all already fans of computers in search of something useful - and cool- to carry with us. Who did not be stunned when Edward Furlong hacked an ATM in Terminator 2 with a laptop the size of a pocket book?
Imagine someone whose relationship with computers was playing 8 bit games on an Amstrad CPC 464, making games in BASIC... You get the idea, right?
All of us then surely bought clunky-chunky clonic PCs, enjoyed them dreaming of someday they will be as little and portable to let us work with them wherever we want. Laptops the size of a regular A4 paper sheet and thick as a Bible were the next adquisition to achieve... Ah, memories. They were heavy, and limited, and get hot as... Hell.
In early 2000 Nokia developed their 9k series phones, big as a brick, with full keyboards, color screen... And still expensive as a kidney transplant...
Yet those devices were limited, and looked like only pro workers will take benefit of them. Unless you are Mr. Hunt and have an Impossible Mission in your hands.
But in year 2008, probably before, some smarty-pants engineers discovered the way to squeeze a processor tiny as a coin into a shell only 9 inches wide. And all we historic lovers of tiny electronic devices discovered NETBOOKS.
What years... Finally we could do things like writing, watch movies, play Windows or DOS games on the road, listen to music... Of course those little laptops were expensive, but also cheaper than those for us unknown HPCs. And still HPCs were only sci-fi devices for the majority of us.
And more years passed.
Laptops get cheaper, and more powerful, and... A lot of things that, unless you're a gamer, left regular PCs just for office tasks and those very specific task only developed in tech enterprises. Of course the fight between smartphones and tablets started and persist, a pacific war between them and Pc and MAC universe to conquer the title of king of electronic device of the century.
Many dishes in the table, all full of delicious food...
But...the taste for little desserts in tiny dishes still dwell in our freaky brains. And some of you
(enthusiasts of Hpc
) started to post pins or reels of your devices. OMG... THEY ARE REAL!! we scream
(exaggerate mode ON
). Just to clarify... of course we have heard of PDAs! , we don't live in a cavern
, but those HPCs looked like if someone decided to take a netbook and play the mad scientist role doing crazy experiments with a shrinking ray.
Also we discovered Raspberry projects, expensive mini laptops with GPUs as powerful as to make them run DOOM Eternal in 4K
(ok, I forgot to turn off the exaggerate mode
), but the Raspberrys looked too amateur-ish, or they're only projects with no near release data, and the tiny RTX handheld, for our experience, seemed to be something candidate to suffer The China Syndrome
(remember the 79's movie?
).
They did not look GENUINE.
But we don't have to wait too much to start diving into the second hand market, just to discover that there are plenty of those sci-fi devices scattered around the world, and for prices as low as 40 dollars sometimes. Of course, the more intact and with all accessories they were, the more expensive they are, and, because of being almost 25 yr old devices, many of them suffer of mechanical or electrical issues
(dim LCDs, broken screens or their lids, batteries lost, no stylus, no charger or cradle, dead ROMs...
) that, obviously, make them cheaper
You know what comes next, right?
Compared with those already little PCs, the HPJornada looks like a tiny toy. I won't do a full review of my HP Jornada - the blue squared spot between those netbook- because here at HPCFactor planet someone did it before, and did it perfectly
Daniel Meinek's HP Jornada 680 review
Two of those netbook were restored and whitened using Hydrogen Peroxyde, and then reassembled them and perform a full upgrade
(SSD, RAM...
) I encourage all of you to spend 20 or 30 dollars and give to the game of Old PCs restoration a try.
I love specially my Asus X101CH...
But, let see this device compared with those netbook face to face...
Aren't they cute? Take a look to the Jornada compared with the battery of the Aspire One, a pen, and it's very CR2032 backup battery...
I think this adventure have just begin... See you in
The HPCPalmtop platet - Chapter 2: The HPC, the PC, and the file-transfer dilemma.
Thanks for reading!!
DISCLAIMER: I'm writing this just for fun and mere entertainment, not taking the role of a high tech reviewer or journalist. I'm not either one of them Expect only newbie content and a chronicle of nostalgia, pityful failures, nonsensical experiments, and scarce successful moments!!
Edited by ABBADON 2024-02-23 10:45 AM
