I couldn't find much information about it, but it was $2 at a garage sale. Unfortunately the power cord was missing so I have to find one that will fit and do 5v dc 2amps. I've read some of these things use Windows CE and some use NetOS (some linux based os made by neoware). I did open it up and on the motherboard (had a 1999 date on it) had some Motorola chip, what appeared to be PC-100 RAM, and a 44pin IDE connector that had flash memory on it. As far as ports go if you can't tell from the picture it has a printer, monitor, keyboard/mouse, ethernet, 2 serial ports, amd a pc card port. So anyone with any ideas what I can do with this thing? The company that made this neoware was bought out by HP in 2007 so the site is gone and I don't see anything on wikipedia about this.
All it says on the case is Neoware NeoStation. On the FCC sticker on the back it says NeoStation Network Computer at the top. Actually looking at the FCC sticker confused me. because on the sticker it says 5VDC 4A, but by the power plug it says 5VDC 2A.
I have a couple of similar items. Most of them are Wyse-type workstations, and they usually have an embedded OS like Windows CE on them. Even when they don't, they usually have a browser and/or a Remote Desktop client loaded on them. The PCMCIA slot tells me that this thing was also intended to connect to non-Ethernet networks when necessary, maybe with a wireless card. I haven't used mine in a while, but I had it deployed as an extra RDP terminal in my house. Instead of setting up a whole separate computer, I just had this thing and an LCD set up in the far corner of the house and remotely controlled my main PC. If you're a really hardcore guy, you might be able to scare up a custom firmware for the thing. Many enthusiasts have compiled their own Linux builds for their favorite terminal machines, and some have even turned them into custom gaming machines (albeit for low-spec emulation apps.)
Something to surf the Interne? I remember companies coming out with dedicated Internet browsing PCs, but this was when he fastest consumer broadband was 128k ISDN (over $100/month), and 99% of the rest of the consumers had dial up, and so a lot of these machines only had 56K modems. On top of that, they only output at 16bit color at 640x480 resolutions.
They're meant for use in corporate environments. With a Citrix or TS farm, you virtualize all the employee's desktops so that they live in images on drive arrays. All you get on your desk is this thing, a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. No local storage that'll fail or break, and more importantly no way for private information to get siphoned off physically. They don't really have any practical use in a home computing scenario.
judging by the complete lack of USB yet the existence of two serial ports, I m assuming it's ancient. Can't think of many applications for it that would be worth the effort though in today's homes.
I've seen those compact PC's in places that use just a software for sales, repair, and with the lan the software can access the stock, print. It's just that, a cheap, compact workstation. I've seen in those places they fix cars, sorry don't know the word in english...
We have those at Bed bath and beyond... We have both IBM thin clients and the Neoware ones. Ours have 64MB of ram and some IBMs have a ~400mhz PowerPC processor, the Neowares have an Intel I think. They run a very stripped down linux distro and just run a 80x25 terminal and Citrix remote desktop for Internet Explorer.
FreeCiv client? Emulation front-end? Second display driver to do text-only output for a sniffer, or an MMO cheat program? Remote streaming music interface? WAN printer server or network bridge? That's all off the top of my head. Obviously you'd have to configure the apps yourself (and maybe compile them yourself too, depending on the distro of Linux or other OS you use) but the potential is there. It's been my experience that the biggest pain in any custom computing device is putting an interface together. This thing already has keyboard, mouse and video built-in and optimized, so getting everything else running is cake by comparison.
So you agree that with the difficult part of customization out of the way, this thing has many potential uses for a hobbyist technician who already has one? Not to be confrontational about it or anything, but that doesn't seem to be what you're saying in previous posts. Can I bother you to elaborate, please?
certainly. any theory is only as good as its result, and in this case results are not the norm for most home users, hence why there's limited appeal in making the most of it. risk and reward at its most basic form =)
All other skepticism aside, I'd like to encourage anybody with one of these things to explore hacking and customizing it. Fifteen seconds with Google produces the administrator manual for the thing: http://www.mitek.ch/Manuals/netOS4.0.2_sysadmin.pdf Bizarrely, the docs state that the licenses for the server-side software are embedded in the CD-ROM, which I guess makes sense for code distributed more than ten years ago. There are other pages dedicated to hacking the thing outright and installing your own OS and firmware code: http://www.wedothose.co.uk/neostation3000.html
