[nine_k]

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 limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank. But a forever-device used for something substantial, something touching money in any way, would have to be much more up-to-date.

[jpk]

> Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank.

This depends pretty heavily on your threat model. You're right that a device like this is exceedingly unlikely to get exploited by attackers casting a wide net against common vulnerabilities. But an attacker targeting you-in-particular would love to learn you've put ancient hardware and/or software on the network.

[bluGill]

Even if there are a lot of exploits on my Amiga (I don't own one, but work with me...), my value is likely low enough that it wouldn't be worth the cost to hack just me. If I was (or become) a major figure politically, militarily, or rich (maybe my 401k is that large - if you can get at it) it would be worth attacking me, but otherwise there are just not enough Amiga owners out there. Also you can expect someone with an Amiga is somewhat more likely than average to be protected - ransomware data and they restore from backups instead of pay. As such the value is exploiting Amiga is likely not high enough to be worth the cost.

[jpk]

Your entire comment is threat modeling, which is great! But it demonstrates my point: using an old, insecure thing is sometimes obscure enough to fly under the radar of one class of threats, but presents a juicy attack surface for another class of threats. And one's own personal risk for any given class of threats will vary depending on one's circumstances. So the parent comment's unqualified statement of, "security is not a consideration for such devices," isn't quite right.

[trollbridge]

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".

[ericjenott]

You've touched on one of my favorite things about using this. There's so much software easily available for it that I could never even try it all even in 10 lifetimes. And it's easy to store too. For example, lets say the average program is 1MB. Then a tiny 128GB SD card could store somewhat more than 100,000 programs. Still not enough? This thing supports at least up to 512GB SD cards, which could hold something close to 500,000 1MB programs. I haven't tried 1TB yet. You can also store dozens of spare SD cards in the CPU compartment, so you can easily have more storage space and more software than you could ever use.

[ForOldHack]

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....

[trollbridge]

It’s an ESP32. You can emulate any system you want.

Part of the point though is that emulating an original PC takes very little power. A 286 doesn’t get you much (who on earth wants to run a 286 OS)?

I could see a case for a 386/486 for running old DOS apps just so you have extra memory, but you could also simply port DOSBox-X to the ESP32 and do things that way.

[lawlessone]

yeah, yesterday we had a post where someone was running fully up to date linux on a Nintendo Wii

[idiotsecant]

There are a lot of 'forever devices' currently touching money in major financial institutions.

[bigfatkitten]

I spent a good chunk of my career in banking. I had many conversations to the effect of “see that RS/6000 in the corner of the network diagram? It processes $45bn in payments every day.”

[indycliff]

did you work at Chase too

[gtirloni]

Yea, and armies of engineers supporting them.

[bigfatkitten]

More often in my experience, it’s one or two greybeards who have been there for 30 years, and are the only two people still in the workforce (or still alive) who understand how it works.

[kstrauser]

That's the wrong form factor for me, though. A TRS-80 Model 100 with modern guts would be my ideal, but something like this but with a faster screen would be nearly a tie.

[tlhunter]

In case you haven't seen this: https://www.clockworkpi.com/home-devterm

[redundantly]

This is not a suitable modern equivalent to the TRS-80 Model 100. It is much smaller and so uncomfortable to use. The arrow keys and trackball are well below subpar, and the software support isn't great.

[kstrauser]

Ouch. I'd had my eye on those before but hadn't heard reviews one way or the other. Those would be bummers.

[kstrauser]

I've drooled over those a few times. All of their models are out of stock right now, though, which makes me wonder if they're still making them.

[RodgerTheGreat]

How about the ZeroWriter Ink? https://www.crowdsupply.com/zerowriter/zerowriter-ink

The focus on the bundled firmware is word processing, but it's open-source and built around the popular ESP32 microcontroller family.

[kstrauser]

Wow, I love the looks of that. I have a Freewrite Alpha that's very similar at first glance, but it has a tiny LCD screen and isn't open source.

[multjoy]

And if you fancy making your own…

https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal

[carlosjobim]

> Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support.

They rather put their phones in a drawer because the battery isn't good anymore.

[Retric]

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.

[binarymax]

Just last month I finally moved on from my iPhone 6, which had been working great for 10 years, because some critical apps stopped working unless I upgraded, but couldn’t upgrade because apple no longer released iOS updates.

It needed a new battery, but held a charge on low power mode for 8 hours, and otherwise was perfectly fine.

[EvanAnderson]

Same with my wife's original iPhone SE. The hardware is doing fine but she's being forced to "upgrade" because of software. It's galling.

[randmeerkat]

> A boring, not-young, not-cool, not-working-at-a-startup IT generalist.

I think you’re cool!

[simondotau]

“Galling” and yet the iPhone SE had legendary long software support, more than any phone which came before. Seven years might not seem remarkable now but back in 2017 it was rare for Android phones to get more than two years of software support, and often that was mostly security patches, plus one major OS upgrade if you were lucky.

[thesuitonym]

This is the reason I switched from Android to iOS. You may be (rightfully so) disappointed that you only got 10 years of use out of it, most of those years got security and even some feature updates. Compared to an Android phone where, if you don't buy it on launch day, you're lucky to get even a full two years of security only updates, and if you're very lucky (read: Purchased a Pixel or Samsung), one or two new versions of Android.

[cestith]

This has not been my experience with Motorola, unless you’re talking about OS major versions. With my last couple of phones I got several point versions and security patches for 3 or so years. It’s not my experience so far with my OnePlus phone either. Certainly I’ve seen phones that never updated from launch day, too, but I don’t think only Google and Samsung do updates.

[swiftcoder]

My less-techy relatives are routinely forced to upgrade because all of their apps drop support for their hardware.

I'm in the process of replacing my nephew's tablet, because his favourite apps (Audible and YouTube) can no longer be installed on Android 7 - the newest OS his hardware can run.

My mum bought a second-hand iPhone 8 a couple of years ago, because the battery in her iPhone 4s finally died. She'll have to replace that soon, though, because a bunch of critical apps (her bank, health insurance, and a few others) no longer support that screen resolution properly, and often place buttons outside of the visible screen area.

[MiddleEndian]

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.

[tomcam]

Who… who was doing the updates?

[MiddleEndian]

The Google Play Store presumably lol (or however Google pushes updates onto Android devices)

I certainly never manually updated anything. Obviously certain services like Lyft or messaging apps are unlikely to work without updates, but there was no reason to change and slow down my texting or email apps, they've done the same shit since forever.

[tomrod]

Software and battery, I reckon, are the mobile phone arena's area for disruption.