I've been quiet on the list for the past few months, because I finished building my computer (yay). I still lack a display for it though, so I merely have what looks like a standalone monitor--I am constantly questioned about where the machine is and people laugh when I point at the little black box. Anyway, I've been thinking about the minimal computer needed to do what I needed--more of a size and battery life constraint than a price thing. Well, I eventually realized (I'm a little dense), that all I needed was networking so I could connect to my powerful workstations at home (dual PII/300). Well, I came up with this solution, which I call Hermes (since this computer basically acts a messenger between me and my other computers). I started designing a computer which was basically nothing. It has ports for a monitor, keyboard, audio I/O, and PCMCIA. It's powered by a 100MHz StrongARM and has a linux kernel in flash. The shell is minimal, having only very basic commands, such as telnet and shutdown. It should run on two AAA batteries. Add a cellular modem PCMCIA and you have a system that will let you harness the power of the damn fast computer sitting on your desktop at home. I'll have sketches and preliminary plans on my site soon (hopefully by this time next week), and I'll put a link to them here. I expect that it will be roughly twice the size of a type III PCMCIA card. So, what am I forgetting? Someone tell me this is crazy before I go too far and lose a lot of money trying to build it. If no one yells at me, I'll assume this is practical and throw my life savings into it--so please speak up. -- Gregory Martin Pfeil Software Engineer mailto:http://falcon.jmu.edu/~pfeilgm/
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