[Coco] So, would you like a little Internet with your CoCo?

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Frank Swygert may have mentioned these words:
>Wonderful idea! Why not just adopt the cell-phone standards, even report 
>to the server that it's a cell-phone page? That would open up a lot of 
>existing services without requesting CoCo specific pages. There may be a 
>way to add something CoCo specific to the existing cell standards.

I hate to be the "wet blanket" here, but for the most part, I wouldn't find 
the "intarweb" very useful for much on the CoCo (well... except possibly 
the CoCoNet concept that Roger Taylor's been waxing poetic about). If I 
want command-prompt Playboy.com, I have Linux's "links -g" with SVGAlib 
support. Text only, I have lynx on machines much faster than the CoCo. (I'm 
a big fan of that newfangled "ethernet" thingy. ;-) Email? I get more email 
every day than can fit in the RAM of my CoCo3. I have myriad overpowered 
systems (by non-gamer standards) for the Internet. I personally don't see 
the CoCo as the best tool for the job, and I (again, personally) would 
become frustrated very quickly trying to shoehorn minimal functionality in 
such a (for this purpose) underpowered machine.

That said, I might consider the gopher protocol to be somewhat useful on 
the CoCo and I've postulated to others that if the gubbermint continues 
their current trend and becomes more than elbows deep WRT trying to control 
the internet and the fallacy that "trusted computing" entails, that the 
next possible outcome would basically be falling back to a FidoNet type of 
system created & supported by ubergeeks like us... But even in that 
scenario, I would probably do much more hacking on my (sorely underused) 
Amiga 4000T and my latest acquisition - one of the 3 machines I started 
serving my little corner of the Internet on - a Sun Netra i5 pizza box.[1]

>Now we need a mini server box. Maybe a mini-ITX board....

[snippage]

Despite my love (and sometimes lust) for all things non-intel, newegg.com 
has a really nice dual-core Atom mini-ITX board for $80, a case & 250W PS 
setup (that takes a 3.5" hard drive & a standard optical disk) for under 
$60 (which you could still populate with laptop parts if you were worried 
more about power savings than price) -- I've done a fair amount of research 
in the matter, and built a *schweet* mini-ITX system for my DJ business[2], 
and it falls down to "if I only had the cashola" to build (at least) one... ;-)

If anyone has questions on the mini-ITX platform, I'd be happy to at least 
try to answer them offlist.

Laterz!
"Merch"

[1] And, as the qmail mail server app hasn't changed much since that system 
was built, I'd easily still be able to host my Tandy Model 100 mailing list 
& personal websites on it... ;-)

[2] IEI Kino 690S1 motherboard, 2.0Ghz single-core Turion, 512Meg RAM (up 
to 4G), smallest case I could find that still supported a lappy optical 
drive. Motherboard was almost $200, but I rescued the processor & RAM from 
a dropped laptop anyway & found a used SATA lappy HD cheap, which really 
swayed my purchasing decision. (and the Atom boards weren't out yet - the 
1.5GHz Via (cyrix) boards were nearly as expensive and less upgradeable - 
my ITX board can support dual-core Turions should they ever drop to a 
reasonable price. ;-)  The board came with source code drivers for the 
sound (impotent for a DJ box) but *only* for the 2.4 kernel, and my partner 
in the bidness is afraid of computers. It runs XP with an available DJ 
package for now, until I can make him "unafraid" of linux. ;-)

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |