It has arrived!
Please welcome 2001's HP Digital Entertainment Center 100c, sporting Red Hat Linux on a Coppermine PIII-based Celeron with 256 MB of RAM and a spacious 40 GB PATA hard drive to store all the MP3s ripped from the 4x CD-RW drive. #retrocomputing
The HP DEC also included support for 10/100 Ethernet, 56k modem, the Gracenote database, RealMedia, ID3v1.1, and SHOUTcast streams with a UI output to your TV and IR remote control (plus front-panel display).
I'll get it hooked up in the lab tomorrow and stream some of the fediverse's radio stations.
This artifact shows that the big players tried to sell your parents a raspberry pi 1 in a premium case running stripped-down xbmc for your living room in 2001 and your parents didn't want it.
@djsundog I don't know. I had never heard of the darned thing. If I hadn't heard of it, how would my parents?
@kurtm it's true that it wasn't marketed with the zeal of a Squeezebox or, dare I say, Sonos. But I bet they ran a few ads for it in magazines they read (for a few months in 2001 anyway)
@djsundog to be fair, i also don't want that now.
@brennen this is how little has changed in nigh on twenty years of tech
@bhtooefr Windows 95 was so ready for the big screen
@bhtooefr @djsundog oh my god.
i'd completely forgotten about it, but gw2k gave my highschool shop teacher one of those. no one could ever figure out what the hell to do with it.
they were still making pretty great machines in that era and for a while after - i got one that year - but in retrospect, i'm gonna say the seeds of their eventual doom were pretty clearly being sown by then.
@djsundog Is there a directory of these radio stations? I love me some streaming audio.
@nivex not an organized one that I know of, but I know SDF runs one, @hairylarry runs one or three, @ajroach42 has one, and I'll keep you apprised of any others I stumble across :)
I have one streaming radio station
MixRemix Radio
http://mixremix.cc
Three on demand stations
KGPL for Deadheads
http://kgpl.org
Jazz From the Live Music Archive
http://kgpl.org/lmajazz
Delta Boogie Radio
http://deltaboogie.com/hifi
And one broadcast radio show
Something Blue
http://sbblues.com
Something Blue also airs on anonradio Fridays at 20:00 hours UTC or 3:00 Central Time.
http://radio.ofmanytrades.com is ~5 thousand rock, blues, jazz, and pop 78 RPM records rotating on shuffle.
Eventually, I'll add more 78s, and probably a second stream for local/independent rock.
@djsundog invent
or else
@djsundog this is basically what www.mini-itx.com wanted BITD
To the point of, like, a build that could be inserted one way into a Windows XP retail box and boot XP, the other way into a Red Hat Linux retail box and boot Red Hat: https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/windowsxpbox/
@djsundog interested what will it do
probably a run-once setup wizard, I think
@zyabin101 it did - just a basic network and audio settings screen
Software Archaeologist
@djsundog I've read "Press OPTIONS for more chaos"
Came with a free CD but the drive is not reading any discs
@djsundog RealPlayer? Buffering.....
The OPTIONS button must exist solely on the remote control I do not have
good old 2.4.7
@djsundog now install a pleroma on it and it's complete
@djsundog lookit those curves!
@bunnyhero and yet rugged - feels like a serious component in your entertainment center, nice and heavy
@djsundog Ooooooo.
Well that's just begging to be reworked/rebuilt from the inside out, isn't it?
These can be had for under $100 on ebay. Really an impressive turnkey device for audio download, ripping, and streaming. You could spend the same amount on a used system and do some software installs to have the same capabilities on a more modern system. But there's a certain cool factor to the 20 year old technology that still functions in the modern world because audio processing is light on cpu and ram.
@hairylarry indeed! this one was only $30 shipped and still had the previous owner's music library intact on the hard drive :) I'm going to upgrade it to 512mb of ram and maybe a faster pentium 3 but otherwise it should be a fine jukebox for the lab for the foreseeable future
To HPs credit, when they discontinued these after a year, they pushed a final software update that unlocked the locked-down bits and set the root password to "redhat"