i-Opener - The $99 Computer That Cost a Company Millions

For some reason the chapter markings have disappeared from this video. I've tried editing the description to get them back but haven't been successful as of yet. Hopefully it gets fixed soon, but in the meantime here's the chapters for those people who want to get to a specific part of this video: 00:00 - Introduction & Overview 02:49 - Unboxing 05:01 - Exploring the Exterior 06:40 - Quite the Coincidence 07:16 - Checking out a newer model 18:32 - Big Oops 19:29 - The Hacking Scene 20:44 - Netpliance's Response 21:43 - Wait, that's illegal 23:08 - Aftermath 25:57 - Getting Windows 98 on this thing 30:07 - To Be Continued... 31:40 - Outro

Man it's just wild we were both working on videos about this thing around the same time and neither of us realized it, heh. Bizarre synchronicity in retro YouTube land. It's sweet to see an older model being unboxed too, this is a different experience than the 2001 model I have! Also neat to see that Netpliance was still using the IPAD acronym then, as I was mistakenly under the impression that they only used the term in pre-release marketing blurbs and dropped it by the time the i-Opener actually launched. Looking forward to part two!

I absolutely love that you need to unscrew a cover to unplug the keyboard, but you can just pop off the cover to upgrade the ram. Amazing!

Back in 1999 I purchased one of these for my mom to use, she absolutely loved it. One of the very first things we did with it was to use the pizza button ... Sadly it took almost a week until the pizza was delivered ! After that ordering pizza was actually very easy . This device did exactly what it was supposed to do and made a very simple portal for non-technical people to use . My mom to this day says she misses How incredibly simple it was to use

I converted one of these into an MP3 player that could be used in a car on long road trips. I reflashed the bios by hot swapping the bios chip into a compatible motherboard after it had been booted up and I had a flash utility running. The hack was a hell of a lot of fun and having winamp available in a car really whipped the llama's ass.

The only thing worse than accidentally hitting the Windows button is accidentally hitting the order-a-pizza button

This has been a real I-Opener.

The really funny thing is that my sister worked for i-opener doing customer support and she brought home a branded mug which I've now got in a box somewhere. If I had known then how easy they were to modify I definitely would've bought a couple because I knew that company was going under from the start. So many missed opportunities.

We actually got quite a few internet orders at the three Papa John's i worked at from 1998-2001.

If you use an IDE to CF card (or SD card) it could all fit together neatly with the metal shield etc. you could even have the card accessible to swap out different operating systems

It's so weird seeing every thing went so smoothly.

That part at the end reminded me. There was this ISP that I used for free for a while that wasn't supposed to be free. You would use the disc, dial out, and go through a signup process. Thing is, while you were on the setup screen, you could use other websites. I didn't use it often--mostly only on my laptop when I was away from home. The ISP had a lot of local numbers in pretty small towns, oddly enough. I also remember using the internet for free legitimately: with my school, and then later with some software that displayed an ad on at least 1/5 of the screen. It's bizarre that I put up with this, since now I avoid anything with ads. But you could pretty easily just cover up the ad part.

ah, 1998-2008. that brief, beautiful period of time when companies forgot that they actually had to be profitable and burned trillions of VC dollars to give us all free and suspiciously cheap stuff. good times. led to real bad times, of course, but good times at first.

a real eye opener for the company after their losses

I was in college when this came out and I was too poor to even afford the $99 price tag. I was sooooo disappointed because everyone else in the CS department was buying these and hacking them. Now the question is, can you get a hold of the ThinkNic? It was an even more esoteric Internet home appliance.

Oh yeah, I remember when Slashdot went nuts about these. That era of cheap inadvertently hackable junk from companies with more money than technological acumen was pretty awesome. Anyone else remember CueCat?

Regarding the IDE cable pin swap, this also happens when the pin header is installed on the bottom side, or if a header was swapped for a socket. I recall encountering other 'appliance' PCs with the same modding issue.

One of my friends had one of these back in the day. Cracked me up when you mentioned using the mail function as a word processor. She did the same thing. She’d write short stories and print them out and show it off to all of us in this little story writing clubs thing who either just handwrote stuff or used a typewriter.

Very good video, never heard of the i-Opener until recently. Also I think every keyboard should include a pizza key 🍕

So many devices store cached data, but devices like this are fascinating to discover ages on, where you can use their native software experience to view data of the time. Many Palm, Cybiko, Newton, etc saved their emails locally for next sync but not much more. It's great to see cached websites, headlines, emails (privacy aside there are still some great finds here!) captured. It's a great digital time capsule.