ruining history
So I figured, new year, nice introspective blog post about the past year. But then, I thought, let’s cut up a bunch of computers instead! So much more fun.
I managed to get ahold of an old Digital VT320 terminal. They’re pretty neat gadgets but not horribly useful nowadays - they have a screen resolution of 80×25 or 132×25 (it’s software switchable) and connect via serial to the host using three-pair cable terminated in DEC MMJ plugs. Originally, I was just going to hook it into a normal computer and use it as a separate screen for the novelty of it, but it turns out it’s very hard to find MMJ plugs nowadays.
So, a plan B was hatched. The screen on the VT320 is 12″ diagonal, which was a pretty popular size for small laptops before the whole widescreen fetish began. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to grab a machine about that size and mount it into the terminal, making a sort-of miniature iMac sort of machine. And, since I evidently have nothing better to do with my time ever, I went ahead and sourced a 12″ iBook G4 to use.
The iBook G4 I have is a 12″ model running at 1.07GHz. It’s got a 30GB disk, combo drive, 512MB RAM and an AirPort Extreme card in it. I set off tonight getting the machine taken apart and kinda roughly reassembling it in a way that would make it into a desktop machine. I pretty much have an iBook G4 tablet now - for the first stab at it, I pretty much just took the machine and flipped the screen around backwards. I think this is essentially how I’m going to have it though I might ditch the frame around the motherboard and rearrange some of the cards instead - certain things like the USB/etc. ports and the DC-In board are situated so things tend to stick out of the sides too much. I also need to find a cheap USB hub to mount inside the enclosure as well, so I can have built-in BlueTooth and whatnot. I’m also thinking about mounting my spare iMate ADB-to-USB adapter in the finished product, just to keep the retro going.
I was actually considering mounting a standard 3.5″ hard drive connected to a FireWire bridge board inside the case. I’m kinda rethinking this plan now, though - it turns out the battery that came with the iBook was one of the recall ones, so I could mount the battery inside the machine somehow and end up with a battery-powered desktop. I definitely want to get a bigger hard drive for it, though, and upgrade the RAM to 1GB. I was also thinking about mounting a webcam in the system, but that’ll depend on how much clearance I end up having in there.