all--

scraped the blogs for a couple of interesting old-tech tidbits.
first, for the gamers, this one came from oreilly's MAKE blog:

>> "Best Home Brew Gameboy Games on a Cartridge
GBADev has an annual competition to create home brewed GameBoy games.
Instead of giving out cash and flash cartridges the aim is to
manufacture a batch of 500 cartridges with the top entries (a
"multi-cart") complete with cart sticker, manual and box. The
cartridges will be manufactured by an "independent party" (not
Nintendo). The cartridges are in, you can order them now. The games
look great."

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link to MAKE blog entry:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/04/best_home_brew.html
link to GBADev:
http://2004mbit.gbadev.org/index.php
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second, BoingBoing tripped over this BBC article about a
cambridge-based plan to minimize the digital divide by creating a kind
of miniature mainframe/terminal setup that networks several "dumb"
stations to a single CPU, sharing its resources among them.
apparently, the future of computing looks an awful lot like the past;
so go ahead and dust off that old PDP you have stashed away in your
basement.

>>"Share one PC among many users and put a billion-plus online
Some friends of mine in Cambridge have gone public with a new
nonprofit project called Ndiyo, which builds on the old AT&T free VNC
project to radically increase the number of users per PC. The way it
works is that you take a single high-powered PC and a whack of cheap
little network boxes that have keyboards, mice and monitors connected
to them, then use free software to share resources on the server
across all the users. If you can only afford one sixth of the cost of
a PC (a position that some billion-plus people around the world are
it), you and five friends can club together to share a single machine
for browsing, document authoring, email and the like.

The Nivo unit itself measures around 12 by eight by two centimetres.
It has no moving parts, but it has ports for ethernet, power,
keyboard, mouse and a monitor.

It comes with two megabytes of RAM. The next version currently under
development will have a USB port, soundcard, local storage capacity,
and will be even smaller.

'Essentially, it is about sending pixels over the net," explained Dr
Wills.

'With modern ethernet connections, you can get enough performance by
sending through compressed pixels.'"

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link to BoingBoing entry:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/29/share_one_pc_among_m.html
link to BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4496901.stm
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