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Foreword, Legalese and other boring crap.
gotta have the boring stuff now. The fun stuff comes later.
(for those of you that don't have Netscape or Mozilla, the word DISCLAIMER is flashing.)
The hacks described in these documents are dangerous, could cause the world to end, your significant other to get pregnant
your mortgage to collapse, your life as we all know it to end, etc. If you elect to do the hacks described within, please do
so at your own risk. You can not sue me if you toast your IO. These hacks are not for the faint at heart.
Now that I have scared you into oblivion... Here's a little history of these things.
History
The Netpliance company created the iOpener unit in an attempt to get a stronghold on the
internet appliance market. Internet appliances are small devices that are designed with
one purpose in mind, Internet access. They are usually stripped-down off the shelf somputers
that are severely crippled and loaded with proprietary software (in this case it is QNX) that
is written to dictate how the machine is used. The Internet Appliances were designed for
people that wanted Internet access but didn't want the burdeon of owning and maintaining
a (then) expensive $1,000 computer.
Netpliance decided to jump on this and they released the Iopener V1 for $99 and a $25.00
monthly access fee with the idea that he access fee over time would replace the cost of
the hardware. However, many hackers took this as an opportunity and purchased hundreds of
these units, adding hard drives and CDROMs turning these into low-cost computers. Netpliance
soon found out about this and released several versions of the IO in an attempt to stop
the hackers including at one point where they would epoxy the BIOS chip into the PLCC socket
in an effort to thwart the hackers. The hackers weren't stopped by epoxy.
The Internet appliance craze didn't last long as the price of hardware dropped to the point
where people that were the target audience for the internet appliances decided that buying
a now $600 computer from Walmart was far more advantageous then paying $100 for a stripped
down version of the same thing. With strong opposition like this, Netpliance didn't last long,
closing down in 2001. Its service was sold to Earthlink, then to AT&T. AT&T held on to it for
a few months then killed the service leaving thousands of users without internet access.
go to page 2!