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Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

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Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#61

Post by tomcam »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #51
Retric wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never dumped a phone over its software. Ware, damage, swapping networks, meaningfully better hardware, or just losing the things explain basically all the replacements me or my friends / family have done. Sure, eventually people stop updating software to work on old devices but that’s because the overwhelming majority of people have already stoped using that hardware for other reasons.

I dumped my last phone, the Palm PVG100, because unwanted software updates made it too slow and ate up its battery life too quickly. It's too bad the PVG100 has the best form factor of any phone I've owned.

Who… who was doing the updates?

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#62

Post by 6SixTy »

fnord77 wrote: post #27

what's the rationale for x86? To run vintage software? I would love an eink laptop like this but with ARM, modern ports and linux

Then search for Raspberry Pi laptop cases and go for the one that can hold your choice of eink display + driver?

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#63

Post by trollbridge »

nine_k wrote: post #24
jmward01 wrote: post #15

I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.

Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support. Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using). Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very li…

The unique thing about an IBM PC compatible like this is that it has an absolutely massive library of software that will continue to work and be "supported".

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#64

Post by DoingIsLearning »

keyle wrote: post #19
kstrauser wrote: post #3

Take my money. No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.

I don't know if you've seen the videos, but the latency from input to result on the screen is, very, very bad. I don't think this is actually what you want. We all want low-power retro computing but expect reasonable latency in usage. We also want WIFI working in every room and e-ink that doesn't suck and doesn't cost half a car... And the ability to browse the web (HTTPS). It's just not there yet. When someone will…

I think it would be 90% of the way there if you swapped the e-ink for a transflective panel with some form of RLCD.

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#65

Post by ForOldHack »

trollbridge wrote: post #63
nine_k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support. Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using). Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very li…

The unique thing about an IBM PC compatible like this is that it has an absolutely massive library of software that will continue to work and be "supported".

i.e. The first picture you see of the machine is running Microsoft Flight Simulator. The First. They knew this was the standard for compatibility.

My question would be Jet by Sublogic, and ... most unfortunately Xenix x86. Which leads me to believe that... you need a very low power cMos CPU, to have that battery life.

There are 12Mhz Harris cMos 286s but they are collector items, and the next step is 486slcs, which may run Xenix 386 w/ TCP/IP stack, rather well.

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1994/ERL-94-65....

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#66

Post by tomcam »

bombcar wrote: post #11
kstrauser wrote: post #3

Take my money. No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.

This is basically the HP 200LX on steroids.

I so desperately wanted one of those.

Later I became pretty successful and spent about 15 years paying massive, tax-deductible sums for tiny ahead-of-their times laptops from Sony, Panasonic, etc. until the first MacBook Air came out and finally delivered on the promise of small laptops with decent performance.

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#67

Post by andai »

Super cool. I wonder how this would work with one of those transflective LCDs, like the Sharp Memory thing they used in the Playdate.

There's a bit more latency than I'd like with the typing. Though maybe that could be fixed on eink with partial updates?

For me the main benefit of a device like this would be reading and writing without distractions, so having it run DOOM smoothly would not help me! But I do really want low latency typing...

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#68

Post by ForOldHack »

bobmcnamara wrote: post #57
sedatk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, it's not emulating an XT. XT is a very specific PC configuration. Maybe they just wanted to emphasize that it was ancient.

Fully upgraded, my XT had VGA, 1MB including extended memory shenanigans, a sound card, a SCSI card, and Ethernet.

I threw in a VGA, and dual 20Mb hard disks. 10Mhz, v20 and 8087 FPU. Dual 6550 serial card, great for modem, over kill for a mouse. A $9 sound card that was AdLib compatible on one chip.

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#70

Post by codebje »

kovac wrote: post #22

Love it! Any idea how long the display can last? I've been playing around with e-paper (nothing as impressive as this!) dashboards. I use Waveshare displays that has a max of 1 million refresh cycles. The display you've used seems more capable. My own humble e-paper projects: https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/

It's probably https://www.good-display.com/product/440.html which is also 1mil refresh cycles and a fast refresh time of 1.5sec - around 185 hours of screen updates, so ~3 months of 5hrs a day typing or a few years of e-reader style usage.

I can't really see a device like this getting used super heavily every day, so expecting it to still be usable from time to time for a few years seems reasonable to me.

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