What's the oldest or most obscure device you see with a web browser?
Linc
OwnerDetroit Icrontian
I once had a NewBuddhist member tell me they browsed the site on their Playstation Vita, because it was the only Internet-capable device they had with them at a monastery. I used to reference that in the README file for Vanilla, because I was quite proud that was possible.
What's the oldest or most obscure device you've used or seen someone use? And we'll say "old relative to when you saw them use it" not, like, the first Internet device you ever used.
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I waited until I had a PC with a Netscape browser and it took a while to find Icrontic-- then Short Media-- and joined it under another user name. When Keith decided to not put it back up, some other folks bought the name and then Brian and others banded together and bought the site Icrontic (the short media site was previously renamed Icrontic). At least my fading memory has it that way.
Feel free to correct me if the above is wrong.....
My work is providing IT support in a retirement community. I split half my day between the corporate network and supporting our residents. Oh where do I even start? I have one resident who I had to advise nearly four years ago that I could no longer support her Emachines Pentium III running Windows XP (corporate policy changes so we would not support any Microsoft system not getting regular security updates) She said, well, I don't have money for a computer, I only really look at my email on it and the news, can you do anything for me? I put puppy Linux on it thinking there is no way I'm going to be able to salvage this thing, but it still works, slowly, but it works.
You remember that First Generation Imac with fruity colored plastic encasing a 13" CRT? I found a way to bridge our wireless to get a whopping 10Mbps over the NIC just so a resident could look at email in the built in mail application. The web browser will load nothing at this point, but the mail client still grabs POP3 fine.
@Cliff_Forster You know what browser version either of those things was running (or care to guess)? I assume it was IE and Safari.
God, I can't recall but I think that first Gen Imac has a Netscape browser on it, it doesn't load anything, but it has a POP3 mail client and that's all they want.
The old Emachines was on IE6 when I upgraded it. It runs Firefox now, an older version but adequate for their purpose, still loads most sites.
Actually, Netscape and Firefox are relatives-- Netscape is earlier and was renamed Firefox when the Mozilla foundation bought it from AOL.
Every so often I still fire up the Quadra for some 68k gaming; it has iCab (WebKit) though they stopped making new 68k versions. Then there's the OLPC XO-1 with their stripped down XULRunner/Gecko browser. The TV has... something.
Does having to support IE6 at one point count? I feel like it should count...
Yessssss, @drasnor serving up the quality content this discussion is fishing for.
A Palm Pilot that @Butters had back when we worked at the local ISP together. He had an adapter that my mind remembers it being a rounded adapter that plugged into the top of the Palm. I don't remember if it was Ethernet or dial-up but as we stood there next to relatively powerful PCs wired to a DS3, there was something "cool" about connecting that little device to the Internet. Not even really sure if he used it to do anything.
I also remember him making calls with it and thinking "This is the future, PDAs with the functionality of a cell phone". I commonly thought back to that as the tech developed in the other direction, phones gaining PDA functionality.
In my personal experience with Web Browsers, Opera on the Wii is as far as I go back. But I remember my Grandma accessing her BofA account on her Commodore 64.
Not quite sure if it counts, but a few years back when I was working for an MSP, I was sent on-site to a museum because they were having computer problems, and weren't able to access our support page from the device. I show up and find out that I've now got to fix an old-ass Windows 95 box hooked up with a token ring adapter to the HVAC system. Computer wouldn't boot, it was trying to load something from the HDD that had gotten corrupted since the last time the PC restarted. Lucky for me deleting that pointer fixed it, but still.