29 Jul
2008
29 Jul
'08
12:50 p.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 29 Jul 2008 at 11:56, Eric Smith wrote:
It could certainly be done in the old days of set top boxes; I remember
booting RISC OS on one of the ARM-based late-80s systems (can't remember if it
was a Bush or Pace one now). Hook up a keyboard and they potentially made
quite nice low-power, silent terminals for web browsing.
Kind of nice in a way; I've always been a fan of hardware X terminals, but the
lack of audio capabilities were really annoying.
I'm kind of surprised a more modern set top box is running Windows - I thought
they'd all be using *BSD / Linux or something totally proprietary.
cheers
Jules
Your average $10 hang-tag scientific calculator
doesn't, but the new $40
hp 20b calculator does. It's sold as a business/financial calculator,
but does have scientific functions. It's based on an ARM-7DTMI
processor running at 36 MHz with 134KB of memory. People on the MoHPC
forums are already discussing repurposing it, and have set up a Wiki for
developer information.
Has there been any talk of repurposing DTV "set top" converter boxes?
I've got one here with an RS-232 connector on it that responded with
a BSOD display, complete with register dump and MMU status when we
had a power glitch. The video and audio capabilities should be
pretty good for the price.