Wireless eMate

Posted Jul 25th 2006 12:00AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: macs hacks

Our friend [Markie] keeps insisting on dragging all of his old tech into the new millennium. In his recent article about cramming a non-airport WiFi card in his old iBook he hinted at another wireless project coming up. Well here it is: a wireless eMate. eMates were sold to the education sector as durable computers for classroom use. Markie had to build a serial cable to transfer the necessary software to the machine. With only 3MB of RAM and a 25MHz processor the machine isn't up for much, but it seems to work fairly well as a terminal.

Reader Comments

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1. hey fabz, we can get married now then!!

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by fucter

2. it's the year 3000 already? rock on! *loves the new millennium*

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by fbz

3. I guess that they've gotten cheaper and I've gotten richer so it doesn't matter too much any more.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by mastershake916

4. Never heard of the emate before this, interesting.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by mastershake916

5. Also i'd like to know if this works with the bronze wavelan card which are cheaper to get.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by mastershake916

6. Well, only the Turbo Bronze is said to be working, not the Bronze. http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/index.php/WiFi But, cheaper to get? If you're out now to buy one such a card, I can hardly imagine a WaveLAN Silver-card like mine is gonna be expensive or much more expensive than a Bronze-card, I mean, this is obsolete stuff by any means (but boy is it fun :-)) I found my card for 17.50 euros ($22,-) on an auctionsite in Holland (In the end I actually paid 15 euros ($19,-) per card, cause I bought 4 of them). I'm not sure how many different versions of these cards are around, but make sure it's a 16-bit PCMCIA-card rated for 5 volts.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Mark hoekstra

7. Old Hardware is Great! It proves that that pice of hardware has withstood the test of time.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Computer_kid

8. Congratulations, this 'hack' is a driver. Which has also been around since early 2000. I own a Newton MessagePad 2100 with a WaveLAN card and Hirochi's driver, I use it as a wireless terminal for my asterisk server. It's nice to have it upstairs and look at the console output and figure out if there is a problem without having to login or turn on any computer. Old news. This site is turning into slashdot.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by optix

9. About being a hack or not, getting it wireless alone hardly is a hack indeed. I'm not claiming that either. But let's get this straight, you own a Newton and hate the fact that this machine gets a little attention? About hacking an eMate, I did however also hand-crankcharge this eMate earlier on: http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/597/making-a-100-laptop-for-75-sort-of Now, I'm not going to combine that with this wireless eMate, but I'm also not quite finished with it yet... ;-)

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by markie

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