Back from the not-so-dead
As I mentioned before, I went to the Trenton Computer Festival this past weekend. I really didn’t go there looking for anything specific except maybe an Atari 800 or 800XL that was in better shape than the one I have now. Since half the parking lot was empty, it was easy to go through everything at the show. The one thing I found was an eMate 300 for $75, pictured here:
I had always loved the Newtons, but they were so bulky and heavy. When Palm Pilots were released, it seemed like a better idea to have something a fraction of both size and weight of the Newton to carry around. As time went on, cell phones took the place of PDAs and now I carry everything I need on my cell phone which syncs perfectly with my Mac (hooray for Bluetooth!).
The eMate is unique in that it’s a Newton with a built-in keyboard, and was only sold to schools. In fact there are two control panels that Newtons don’t have: Classroom Setup and Teacher Setup. I thought it would be a good idea to have a unit I could bring up to speed for the internet and use for blogging without having to carry around an expensive Powerbook all the time.
One thing I had to find were the then-popular, now-obsolete 3Com ethernet cards. Out of pure luck, I found one at my local computer store with a dongle for $18.
So I start the horrible task of getting the eMate connected to a modern PC so I could install the ethernet drivers on it. Not an easy task since the eMate didn’t support networking or Bluetooth “out of the box”. The way I got the eMate, all it supported was the old serial connection. The Belkin USB->Serial adapater I bought long ago didn’t work with OS X so I had no choice but to use my PC’s serial port. After finally finding the software I needed on chuma.org, I got the ethernet drivers on my eMate, and my eMate was able to communicate with my Mac over ethernet. No more serial cables! I even got the eMate to work with my Orinoco Gold 802.11b card.
The next day I stopped into CompUSA for printer paper. I walked to the Mac section like I always do and there, for sale, was an old Blueberry iBook.
It seemed to be in good shape, but had no power cord. I ran home, grabbed mine, went back and tried it out. The hard drive wouldn’t boot OS X and the trackpad was shot. Since CompUSA is notorious for overpricing even the most obsolete items, I asked how much they wanted for it and squinted while I waited for the inevitable. $500? $400? No, they wanted $100 for it. Good ones go for $350 or so on eBay. I couldn’t buy it fast enough.
The trackpad was easy to fix because the ribbon cable simply came loose from the holder. Turns out there was no battery in it either, and I didn’t even check to see if there was one since I saw the cover for it so I assumed that the battery was in there (we all know how to spell ass-u-me, right?).
Still no big deal. I tried installing Panther on it, but it wouldn’t even boot from the CD. So I stepped it down to Jaguar. That booted from the CD fine, but got stuck on “Reading Packages”. I wound up installing OS 9 on it just to get it working. Turns out the thing has only 64 MB of RAM in it, and OS X requires 128 MB. After reading about the same installation problem, it turns out that everyone who tried installing Jaguar had the same problem and the same amount of RAM. I’m waiting on a RAM shipment which should fix the problem.
So now I have a Blueberry iBook and an eMate. The eMate’s almost the same size as the iBook which makes me wonder why I should keep the eMate except as a novelty item. An iBook would work better as a blogging computer. Maybe I’ll put the eMate on eBay.
Mike
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