Written 1 August 2024
I started collecting old palmtops/handheld PCs/ultra-light laptops/whatever devices because they're
a cool form factor. They all had a couple things in common:
No ethernet port
No Wi-Fi
Built-in modem OR a PCMCIA slot
Dial-up was the common denominator. Where I live, in theory, I can get a real phone. But reality
is that will cost a lot money for getting one device online at a near useless rate. Another reality
is that the modern Internet isn't friendly for such devices.
Every good project has milestones and end states. This is not one of those. The milestones occurred to me as I hit them because I don't know enough to figure out what a major accomplishment is before it makes sense. Learning!. In retrospect, here are the goals:
There are a number of technical challenges to this, chief of which is that protocols for communicating on the Internet have evolved while all of my palmtops are locked in a much simpler time. My earliest devices were lucky to even have a TCP/IP stack within Windows CE, so HTTPS is out of the question. This is a hurdle many others have to contend with and there are out of the box solutions that I'll cover later.
The next technical challenge: Interfacing a modem with my existing network. I already have a POTS phone on the network, but its connected through a GrandStream ATA and direct dials an IP and port. So, the next challenge was obtaining a modem that could talk the same language as my my devices with built in modems. This was relatively brief, USRobotics gear is all over eBay, including business class devices that used to be 4 figures of remote connectivity.
Modem to modem connections are imminently possible. In fact, you can do that with a a single, 2-port ATA by having it simply direct dial the other port. But that's not dorky enough, I'm here for the real deal of dialing through a PBX and getting transferred to another modem. Besides, buying a 2 port ATA for every device I want online will somehow be pricier than what my stated end goal will be.
This will be brief, because there were very few things that will not be an issue. First,
one friend of mine who is admittedly more radio oriented than computer expressed concerned
that these devices would be unwillingly violated by the Internet as soon as they were online.
Fair assumption, seeing as these devices are 20+ years old and don't even have a concept of
virus protection. So why is this a non-issue? Easy. The Internet generally doesn't have a concept
of the architectures on which these devices run. They are primarily SH3 CPUs, with a couple of ARM
and MIPS devices. This is a target pool so small, niche, and not critical to any infrastructure that
no credible threat would actually bother with it. I told my buddy that, should one of these devices
get compromised, I'd immediately turn it over to a museum as an heirloom, then track down the
perpetrator and buy them a beer.
And that's it. Everything else about this is a problem and not remotely worth your time.
Unless you're rad as hell like me.
