i-Opener The 1999 computer with a PIZZA KEY
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Date: 2023-08-18
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Comments and reviews: 19
fanjoy
My god, what a time capsule (from the year before I first came to the United States myself! The American War on Terror in full-throttle (and still with quite a lot of public enthusiasm; I'm sure that would hold up, Sony positioning itself to monopolize music sales in multiple continents and root-kitting the hell out of its customers, the cusp of the Dot Com bubble bursting, of course low-bitrate music streamed by RealPlayer. As you said, it's a time capsule (to failed planning at the end of history. For the sake of this video 20 years later, we are lucky that this thing dates back to time where you could release an always online product, but the average consumer could probably count on intermittent service for various reasons, so using the machine then would simply give you the most recent cached data (and not simply wipe the thing every time. And that pizza key is cocky as hell. Great video as usual!
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My god, what a time capsule (from the year before I first came to the United States myself! The American War on Terror in full-throttle (and still with quite a lot of public enthusiasm; I'm sure that would hold up, Sony positioning itself to monopolize music sales in multiple continents and root-kitting the hell out of its customers, the cusp of the Dot Com bubble bursting, of course low-bitrate music streamed by RealPlayer. As you said, it's a time capsule (to failed planning at the end of history. For the sake of this video 20 years later, we are lucky that this thing dates back to time where you could release an always online product, but the average consumer could probably count on intermittent service for various reasons, so using the machine then would simply give you the most recent cached data (and not simply wipe the thing every time. And that pizza key is cocky as hell. Great video as usual!
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Tetsujin
Ha, iOpener! I had one for a while. I expect you go into this in the video but it was popular to buy these, replace the BIOS, and add a hard drive and USB network adapter to turn the thing into a general purpose all-in-one PC. Of course this wasn't great for the company selling them (who sold the machine cheap in the hope of making money off the internet service it required) so they made changes to stop that, like epoxying the original BIOS in place to prevent its removal, removing the hard drive header, etc.
I didn't use the stock keyboard with it, I got a PS/2 splitter and connected a nice compact keyboard and trackball.
I had fun with mine for a while, used it as an X terminal and living room computer, but eventually concluded that it just wasn't a very good machine, so I sold it cheap at the flea market. It was fun, though.
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Ha, iOpener! I had one for a while. I expect you go into this in the video but it was popular to buy these, replace the BIOS, and add a hard drive and USB network adapter to turn the thing into a general purpose all-in-one PC. Of course this wasn't great for the company selling them (who sold the machine cheap in the hope of making money off the internet service it required) so they made changes to stop that, like epoxying the original BIOS in place to prevent its removal, removing the hard drive header, etc.
I didn't use the stock keyboard with it, I got a PS/2 splitter and connected a nice compact keyboard and trackball.
I had fun with mine for a while, used it as an X terminal and living room computer, but eventually concluded that it just wasn't a very good machine, so I sold it cheap at the flea market. It was fun, though.
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Dustin
The internet appliance idea was a little a head of it's time. Now everything is online. My parents bought a fridge recently and it is online and they can view what is inside from their phone while at the store. We also now have pizza buttons on our phones in the forms of apps or even sometimes on an android or roku TV. This really reminds me of webTV minus the TV or something. Was such an interesting time back in the day. I want to say the microphone on it was for something like Media Ring online phone service but the deal fell through. Things like media ring were services where you would do phone calls through a website so you wouldn't have to disconnect from your dial-up internet. It was also a way to get around long distance charges.
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The internet appliance idea was a little a head of it's time. Now everything is online. My parents bought a fridge recently and it is online and they can view what is inside from their phone while at the store. We also now have pizza buttons on our phones in the forms of apps or even sometimes on an android or roku TV. This really reminds me of webTV minus the TV or something. Was such an interesting time back in the day. I want to say the microphone on it was for something like Media Ring online phone service but the deal fell through. Things like media ring were services where you would do phone calls through a website so you wouldn't have to disconnect from your dial-up internet. It was also a way to get around long distance charges.
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mizu
You know as soon as I saw this remind me when I was younger. My dad almost got one of these for my grandma that way she could email us from Toronto. Then we found out that the service wasn't available in canada and if we wanted to operate a connection for my grandmother in Canada, it would have been a surcharge on us because then they had to do some crazy crap which was too complicated by that standard. Think of that in 2002 xD
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You know as soon as I saw this remind me when I was younger. My dad almost got one of these for my grandma that way she could email us from Toronto. Then we found out that the service wasn't available in canada and if we wanted to operate a connection for my grandmother in Canada, it would have been a surcharge on us because then they had to do some crazy crap which was too complicated by that standard. Think of that in 2002 xD
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ironcito
3: 34 There weren't wrong, they only failed to see that the internet appliances would actually be mobile devices. They foresaw the simple UI and even the subscription model, but they left the hardware relatively unchanged. If they had made that screen touch-sensitive, added a battery and wireless networking, and removed the keyboard and stand, they would've been on the right track. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20.
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3: 34 There weren't wrong, they only failed to see that the internet appliances would actually be mobile devices. They foresaw the simple UI and even the subscription model, but they left the hardware relatively unchanged. If they had made that screen touch-sensitive, added a battery and wireless networking, and removed the keyboard and stand, they would've been on the right track. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20.
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Mechjoc
Watching this gave me a flashback. My dad bought his uncle a media/internet pc. Except it was. Special. It was a Compaq Windows PC. What made it special was it had an IR remote and keyboard. Two separate things, with the remote having a trackball. The big selling point was the. I wanna say 32 RCA crt monitor. Yeah, it was a TV that only hooked to the PC over VGA. Wihf the pc having a tuner. Shame it got trashed.
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Watching this gave me a flashback. My dad bought his uncle a media/internet pc. Except it was. Special. It was a Compaq Windows PC. What made it special was it had an IR remote and keyboard. Two separate things, with the remote having a trackball. The big selling point was the. I wanna say 32 RCA crt monitor. Yeah, it was a TV that only hooked to the PC over VGA. Wihf the pc having a tuner. Shame it got trashed.
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Jose
12: 55 Oh, the always interesting topic of Audio CD DRM, you should take your point of view on it. The system mentioned there wasn't the dreaded rootkit, it was a previous attempt known as 'Disc2Play', and it was just a pressed, completely empty data session! But the separation between sessions was easily noticeable and a Sharpie to paint on that separation sufficed to defeat this first Sony DRM
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12: 55 Oh, the always interesting topic of Audio CD DRM, you should take your point of view on it. The system mentioned there wasn't the dreaded rootkit, it was a previous attempt known as 'Disc2Play', and it was just a pressed, completely empty data session! But the separation between sessions was easily noticeable and a Sharpie to paint on that separation sufficed to defeat this first Sony DRM
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fanjoy
It seems to me like it would be a cool upgrade project to put an AMD K6 III+ in there, max out the memory and use a CompactFlash card as storage, of course with a less closed off Operating System. It's still not going to be good at any gaming with the Passive Matrix display, but there are other uses for computers this thing would have been pretty useful for, if only it wasn't so closed off.
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It seems to me like it would be a cool upgrade project to put an AMD K6 III+ in there, max out the memory and use a CompactFlash card as storage, of course with a less closed off Operating System. It's still not going to be good at any gaming with the Passive Matrix display, but there are other uses for computers this thing would have been pretty useful for, if only it wasn't so closed off.
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Gavin
Please just leave this 'as is'. As you said, it's a time capsule, then if continues to operate, or is relatively easy to fix in the future, will still be stuck permanently from when it was last able to connect to the outside world. As crazy as it is to see the last uploaded old weather, news and shopping links today, in another 20-30 years it truly will be an original glimpse into the past.
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Please just leave this 'as is'. As you said, it's a time capsule, then if continues to operate, or is relatively easy to fix in the future, will still be stuck permanently from when it was last able to connect to the outside world. As crazy as it is to see the last uploaded old weather, news and shopping links today, in another 20-30 years it truly will be an original glimpse into the past.
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Jason
When I saw that 2001 box. I was transported to my years of working PC Sales/Memory counter at CompUSA. I remember selling a version of the i-Opener but I don't remember it having the pizza button on our display unit.
I worked at CompUSA from 1998-2002. We had all kinds of wierd computer tech sold there and companies always had sweet endcap purchases for wierd crap like this thing!
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When I saw that 2001 box. I was transported to my years of working PC Sales/Memory counter at CompUSA. I remember selling a version of the i-Opener but I don't remember it having the pizza button on our display unit.
I worked at CompUSA from 1998-2002. We had all kinds of wierd computer tech sold there and companies always had sweet endcap purchases for wierd crap like this thing!
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Rose
Seems like the biggest mistake was putting these in circuit city and not, say, wal-mart (where all e-waste computers like this live these days, grocery stores, hotels (take one home for the low, low price of) etc. Someone who's only got 100 to spend and isn't techy likely won't be ordering one of these for themself online, and also probably won't visit electronics stores very often.
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Seems like the biggest mistake was putting these in circuit city and not, say, wal-mart (where all e-waste computers like this live these days, grocery stores, hotels (take one home for the low, low price of) etc. Someone who's only got 100 to spend and isn't techy likely won't be ordering one of these for themself online, and also probably won't visit electronics stores very often.
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Computer
Online banking started around 1995 with Wells Fargo bank. Online banking open the door for e-commerce stores, products and services. Dominos pizza has been popular since 1980 s. Dominos is probably the most popular pizza in USA? Microsoft had the WebTV box in 1990 s - 2000 s. Era of land lines, PC Modems, and Dial-up networking. AOL, EarthLink, AT&T, CompuServe, etc.
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Online banking started around 1995 with Wells Fargo bank. Online banking open the door for e-commerce stores, products and services. Dominos pizza has been popular since 1980 s. Dominos is probably the most popular pizza in USA? Microsoft had the WebTV box in 1990 s - 2000 s. Era of land lines, PC Modems, and Dial-up networking. AOL, EarthLink, AT&T, CompuServe, etc.
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GeoNeilUK
This is a market that Acorn/Olivetti could have gotten into if only they'd carried on developing the Archimedes. Cheap Unix workstations (and even servers) and games consoles are other areas they could have had a go at.
But the Archimedes ran on some custom CPU architecture that wass designed specifically for it. obviously that didn't go far, did it?
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This is a market that Acorn/Olivetti could have gotten into if only they'd carried on developing the Archimedes. Cheap Unix workstations (and even servers) and games consoles are other areas they could have had a go at.
But the Archimedes ran on some custom CPU architecture that wass designed specifically for it. obviously that didn't go far, did it?
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Soulless
To be honest, I would love a pizza key. Though it needs some improvements. Like you press it, the pizza database comes up with all the local pizzerias, you can select your pizza, add or remove toppings, where I live, in a small town in Europe, we don't have online ordering (at least where I am, you gotta make a phone call, so, this would be pretty neat!
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To be honest, I would love a pizza key. Though it needs some improvements. Like you press it, the pizza database comes up with all the local pizzerias, you can select your pizza, add or remove toppings, where I live, in a small town in Europe, we don't have online ordering (at least where I am, you gotta make a phone call, so, this would be pretty neat!
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stickyfox
When these things came out I was a big FreeBSD hacker. Everyone was buying them, ditching the subscription, and wiping the drive and making thin workstations out of them.
I really wanted one for a while but then I found how abysmally slow and terrible they were. and I was using a NeXT Color TurboStation at the time. so I passed.
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When these things came out I was a big FreeBSD hacker. Everyone was buying them, ditching the subscription, and wiping the drive and making thin workstations out of them.
I really wanted one for a while but then I found how abysmally slow and terrible they were. and I was using a NeXT Color TurboStation at the time. so I passed.
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Michael
I feel like Smart TVs are kind of a spiritual successor to this kind of appliance. They're both essentially just computers stripped down to the bare necessity for streaming, news, and stuff. I imagine a spiritual successor would do quite well in the modern day, especially for old people who don't want to get used to computers.
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I feel like Smart TVs are kind of a spiritual successor to this kind of appliance. They're both essentially just computers stripped down to the bare necessity for streaming, news, and stuff. I imagine a spiritual successor would do quite well in the modern day, especially for old people who don't want to get used to computers.
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Treeline
I drove like 75 miles to a Circuit City to get one of these to install Linux on back in the day, hacking them was basically a meme on Slashdot. All I really remember about it is how the screen was like a mid 90s laptop in terms of contrast and response time, and the machine itself was not fast even under Linux.
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I drove like 75 miles to a Circuit City to get one of these to install Linux on back in the day, hacking them was basically a meme on Slashdot. All I really remember about it is how the screen was like a mid 90s laptop in terms of contrast and response time, and the machine itself was not fast even under Linux.
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Airsaber
Great video, as usual. I thought that the pizza key would be the most entertaining thing about this PC, but it turned out to be way more interesting than I thought!
To be fair. they weren't that wrong about the future of web devices - they just didn't expect it to be phones.
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Great video, as usual. I thought that the pizza key would be the most entertaining thing about this PC, but it turned out to be way more interesting than I thought!
To be fair. they weren't that wrong about the future of web devices - they just didn't expect it to be phones.
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RealityVeil
Can I humbly recommend setting up a fake PBX that daisy-chains into your home network? They would give you the ability to put these modem-only systems online and see how many of their internet functions still work. Maybe it'd ping an NTP server and update it's clock.
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Can I humbly recommend setting up a fake PBX that daisy-chains into your home network? They would give you the ability to put these modem-only systems online and see how many of their internet functions still work. Maybe it'd ping an NTP server and update it's clock.
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