Mailstation

[FyberOptic]

Anyone who's been in chat lately has prolly heard of my goings on with the Mailstation here, but I thought that image was neat enough to post here for a change.  It's a tech website, after all..!

I've documented a lot of what I've worked on in my LJ, for anyone that wants to see.  There's some other pictures too, like of FyOS that I've been working on for it.

[Red_Raven]

Hmm, how did you even get that to hook up to the internet and get that Fybertech logo on it?

[FyberOptic]

Well I didn't hook it to the internet for that, but I converted the image to 2-colors and then wrote a program to display it, and copied that over a printer cable, basically.

It can use the internet natively though, kind of.  Its default functionality when you buy one is to just have a phone line plugged into it, and you can send/receive email without needing a PC.  I've never really used it for that much though, especially since I don't have dial-up internets anymore.

But it also has the ability to print emails via a normal parallel (printer) port, so with some trickery, you can make its parallel port talk to a PC parallel port via a printer cable (or a special one called a laplink cable, actually), and then more trickery on top of that lets you load code into it, to make it do things it normally can't do.  Such as run FyOS..!

Also, I made a temp page for all the images and such I've made so far.

[Altzan]

That is some neat stuff there. And now I'm going really dorky by asking, what's a mailstation? It certainly looks old.

[FyberOptic]

They're not too old actually, they first popped up around 2000.  The one I have is one of the first.  They made several models over the following years, up to a wireless one even (I'll attach a picture), all of which looking a bit slicker and more modern than the one I have (though I like the blockier look myself).  The newest model is incompatible with the code hackery I've been doing though.  They completely changed processors.  The older ones use a Z80, which is what was used in lots of old game consoles (like Coleco Vision), home computers (like TRS-80 and MSX), arcade games (like Pac Man, Galaga, etc), in the GameBoy (until GBA), and even still used as recent as in those fancy TI graphing calculators and such.  The chip is kind of a cousin to what was used in PC's.

Anyhoo, you used it to send and receive email without needing a PC, by hooking a phone line into it.  Their profits came from you paying a monthly fee to use their email service through it, though clever folk knew ways to get around that.  In the end, I guess they realized people tend to actually use PCs for email, and they stopped making'em.  Cidco made them to start with, then it changed hands to Earthlink at some point or something.

[Altzan]

That is actually a pretty cool idea. Except for the paying money part. And Yeah, sometimes blocky is better. I am living proof of that by using a computer that wasn't made to run Windows XP in the first place.