[jazz music with extra cheese plays]
[computer buzzes, beeps] - Yeah, that's right. This thing has a dedicated PIZZA BUTTON! It does one thing and one thing only: order pizza. A glorious existence indeed. And the way it performs
this most noble of tasks is by connecting to the
internet through this thing. The Netpliance i-Opener NP1000,
released in the fall of 1999 by Netpliance Incorporated
out of Austin, Texas. Though specifically what I
have here is the 2001 model, misleadingly released in the year 2000, a thing that is "the world's simplest way to get internet and email," apparently. Along with all kinds of
web goodies like news, weather, sports, stocks,
shopping, and more, it's not a PC, it's for
people who don't want a PC! Even though inside it's still
a PC, but we'll get to that. The i-Opener was geared
towards the internet-curious, folks new to computers,
or anyone seeking a way to just do email without buying a full
desktop. Eye-opening stuff, and even more so when
you hear its price: $99. Seriously, that was it!
For the entire system with an LCD monitor. Granted, it was a crappy
passive matrix DSTN, but who caress? Nobody was playing games or video on here. It's all text and photos. And at a time, when
most LCD monitors alone cost multiple times more
than this entire system, $99 for an i-Opener seemed
infeasible, because it was. It reportedly cost nearly
$500 to manufacture which was done by Quanta
Computer in Taiwan, by the way, known at the time for making
laptops for Dell and HP. And that's effectively what you have here. An x86 laptop crammed into
an upright form factor with a stripped-down operating system. And the whole idea was minimizing cost to shift as many units as possible to secure a market foothold.
Netpliance sold it at a loss and banked on the age-old
strategy of subsidizing, not only charging $21.95 a month
to use the device, but also partnering with brands, websites, and other third parties
to promote products and services through the i-Opener. Including that pizza
key, which originally, when pressed, would order Papa
John's pizza specifically. As stated in contemporary
articles I dug up. Although Netpliance also stated that if the Papa deal fell through, there were always other deals on the table for anyone who wanted a slice of the pie. And according to later reviews, by 2001, pressing the pizza key simply brought up a
webpage of phone numbers for nearby pizza joints instead, like mine is presumably
trying and failing to do. On that note, yeah, the i-Opener hasn't been
usable for ages now, at least not in its
original connected form. Despite its x86 internals, it's
not a full PC out of the box and relied on Netpliance
online services to function. Services long since taken
down with the hardware here becoming a largely forgotten relic from the time of internet appliances. And for a few short years around the turn of the
millennium, standalone email and web boxes like this
were sprouting up like weeds, and Netpliance was one of
the earliest to buy in. - "The idea was to build
products that weren't PC-based "that could connect to the internet. "Today if you look at projections
for internet connections, "they grow tremendously
compared to the number "of personal computers being
manufactured. So in the end, "the PC and the internet
are no longer synonymous. "In fact, the PC is becoming
much more like the mainframe and it's old technology!" - And this rhetoric was commonplace. Trade shows, the media, and every other tech
entrepreneur with a pulse talked of the end of traditional PCs for the age of cheaper standalone
web devices was upon us. According to a 1999 report
by International Data Corp, this device category was expected to be worth $15 billion by 2002, and companies rushed to capitalize. You had the 3Com Audrey, the Honeywell WebPAD,
Compaq MSN Companion, the ePods One, Intel Dot
Station, Sony eVilla, Gateway AOL Touchpad,
and so many, many more. But yet, Netpliance was
a prime early example with a machine that wasn't plug and play, eh, it's "plug and playful!" Claiming to be the first of its kind with an instant on simple
browserless view of the web like "George Jetson meets Martha Stewart." Although in that initial reveal, it was known as the i-Opener
Internet Personal Access Device or IPAD. Hmm, kind of a catchy name,
but they didn't stick with it, and it was simply known as the i-Opener by the time it launched on autumn of '99 and that was only online or by phone, it didn't hit physical retailers until early in 2000 at
stores like Circuit City and Comp USA, the latter of which is where mine would've
been originally purchased back in the day, though
as you might expect, I found mine in its box while thrifting over a decade ago now, not quite complete but close enough for me to happily take it home. Inside was the system itself, a keyboard and mouse combo peripheral, a fluff-filled welcome letter and membership privacy policy info, and a 1.84 amp wall wart power supply providing 19 volts of
pizza ordering power. There's also an instruction manual packing 90 pages covering
all the basic setup and troubleshooting tips you'd expect along with plenty of
Q&A sections for newbies and testimonials from existing
i-Open-ed users, going on about how excited they were
to use it for years to come. And surely it'll last years, right? The package also would've
come with a telephone cord, but it's missing. No problem. Just go out into the wild and you can find those
things all over the place. And I still have the Goodwill receipt from when I bought it in 2012 too. Not bad. 15 bucks for a nice working
system! Er well, decently nice. It could do with a cleaning which I never got around to back then, so let's take care of that real quick. And luckily it appears to be lightly used with very little in the
way of wear and tear. Just some stains, grime, and a few particularly smudgy areas where something rubbed up on it and left some stubborn marks. The rest is your mandatory dirt and dust from use and neglect and what appears to be
makeup, if I had to guess, like someone was applying
foundation while using it. But yeah, nothing a brief scrub
and wipe down couldn't fix. And with that, we have quite
the fresh looking i-Opener, so let's plug it in and give it a go. [system powers on rather silently] [i-Opener startup sound plays And there we go, a rather silent startup experience, makes sense as it
doesn't have a hard drive or big fans inside, only
a flash drive for storage and a low profile cooler
in there somewhere. And you can see here it
says you have no dial tone, your i-Opener could not
connect over the phone line. That's because there's
nothing to connect to. And I also don't have a
phone line plugged in. But yeah, this right here is what you're greeted with on startup. And while it did take a minute
or so to boot up from cold, this never fully powers
down until you unplug it. So even if you press the
power button right there, pressing it again just
brings it right back, it puts it into a standby mode. And that's really the whole idea is to just have it always
on for your convenience, but also so it could dial
into the Netpliance servers to download content
and OS updates anytime. Yeah. On the note of the operating system, what we have here is
built on QNX version 4.25, which is a Unix-like microkernel system by Quantum Software Systems in Canada, later owned by RIM or BlackBerry. And on startup you're greeted with this homepage and
eight shortcut buttons which are pretty self-explanatory. But yeah, weather, finance,
sports, entertainment, news, those are all personalized
internet content. The web guide and shopping are just a collection of
links to different places, you can do that online, and
mail is email, imagine that. But yeah, this thing is
designed to never power off, downloading your emails, news articles, weather forecasts, stocks, or whatever else in the
background periodically without user involvement which would've been pretty
cool in the late '90s. It just caches everything away
for later access by the user which also means that each
one of these functions like a time capsule of the last
moment it ever went online. And this particular unit right here, as far as is concerned, it's still 2002, December
31st, 2002 to be precise. Just press the Home key right
here and get back to this. And yeah, let's open
up some of these things that are still cached from
the last time it was online. So apparently it was in Elmira, New York, by the previous owner where it was 57 degrees
clear and calm, 89% humidity, oh my goodness, look at this forecast. No, okay, so this is April,
2002 for this forecast. So maybe that's the
last time it was online. And the clock is still just counting up. It's weird, like the clock, you can't
even change or adjust and I mean this thing is so locked down. I mean, even looking in the manual, when you look up how to
adjust the date and time, it's like you can't, not by yourself. Call 1-800-iOpener and then ask customer
care to change it for you. So I can't even open that up to see exactly what it thinks the date is. Let's just go to the news. This is a good example of
the last time it was online. Yeah, more April, 2002 stuff. So apparently three winning tickets were sold in a $325 million lottery. That seems so very small in the days here of like
$1.3 billion lotteries. But yeah, look at all these
headlines here on the side. So we've got US concludes
Bin Laden escaped Torah Bora, Powell says Sharon gives
timeline on withdrawal, Bush to give Americans update in the war on terrorism. This is very, very 2002 stuff. Yes, September 11th probes. This is kind of funny too
also, in the days of 2023, New York City hits 91, ooh, breaks 106-year-old temperature mark. And you can really see that unfortunate passive
matrix display here doing its thing. It's very easy to lose the mouse cursor, but considering you're
just looking at text and a few images here and
there, it's not the worst. And we are really limited though in terms of what we can open up and see because of course it's just whatever's cached
on here is what we've got. So we can't just go and connect and see any of these other things. But yeah, it's pretty nifty, again, to just see this
fascinating moment in time. Apparently Ford had a fourth
straight quarterly loss, then Pfizer earnings
surge on strong sales. Hmm, some things never change. Office Depot says their
profits are rising. [laughs] Oh 2002, that's wonderful. What kind of sports news do we have here? ESPN.com is the sponsor for this. The Bucks a step forward in playoff race. Anna Kournikova, that's a name
I haven't heard in forever in Sports Entertainment. I'm sure this is fun. Tartan Parade brings up the
10,000 bagpipers to New York. It very much seems geared towards the area that
you're in, it's interesting. World's media pull out
stops for Queen Mother. Yeah, she was still around. How old was she at that point? Yeah, 101-year-old Royal Matriarch. Anyway, Mr. Showbiz was
apparently the sponsorship for the entertainment section,
whatever that is or was. Oh this is great. 2002, once again, showing it's 2002 and is music companies still looking for online hit. [laughs] Celine Dion's new album this week gave record giant Sony Music
reason to both cheer and weep, the CD topped sales charts but also infuriated fans in Europe when the disc copyright
protection technology sent computers crashing. Dude, this is that Sony
root kit thing, wasn't it? There was some garbage going on back then. We intend to get the majority
of the world's music content into the Pressplay service
sooner rather than later and we continue to talk
to all the music companies about offering the most
flexible rights possible for the content. Okay, yeah, you get the idea of the wonderfulness that is captured on each of these machines
that is still working and has the storage intact. It's kind of interesting
to just turn on any of them and see when the last time it was online. Now unfortunately, there's not a ton of stuff stored on there and it is mostly text. There were some emails
from the previous owner but I think I've already deleted them. Not like there was much
here to see, but yeah, I was gonna say there
was only 16 megabytes of flash storage in here, split up into four partitions, and a whopping seven
megabytes was available to the user or so, you know. Yeah, definitely quite
a bit in terms of text. But yeah, this web guide really is just a collection of
links to various websites that they wanted you to visit or they had partnerships
with or you know, whatever. I don't even think you
could customize these. See what's in the food here, Better Homes Kitchen, Cooking.com Epicurious, Food Network. Reference, Ask Jeeves! And of course you could
just open the web browser that it came with. So go to any website you wanted to, whatever man, obviously
not a thing anymore. And then the shopping, again,
just a collection of links but instead of clicking a list of links, you click these little areas in this non-existent little digital mall. Yeah, again, a lot of
these are still around but many of them are very much gone and that's about all
that you could have done with this back in the day. I mean you've pretty much seen it here, the limited storage and
the limited everything and being so locked down and lack of being able to
customize stuff at least easily. It was really just an
Internet's appliance. You couldn't even open or read many email attachments
or web downloaded files. It just didn't let you do that. That stuff was locked down other than like simple
text and image files. I think that's about all you could open. Interestingly though,
there is this audio section and this would let you
stream like real player, real network music, like
those kind of playlists at very, very low bit rates I assume. But again, can't do
anything here with that now. It doesn't let you play
audio files or anything but I don't even think
it lets you open those. This is a kind of an oddity too. It does actually have
a microphone on here. You might wonder what does that do? Well, nothing at all. It's not utilized. I believe it was planned for
some kind of future thing. There's something in the manual here. Yeah, what's the microphone for? It's a feature we plan to incorporate into the i-Opener in the future. That never happened but it does actually
support printing as well. Yeah, got the parallel port right there. But to my knowledge,
there's only one printer or like series of printers
that were allowed, that being the Cannon
BubbleJet 2010 or 2000 series that of course they had a
partnership to sell themselves for $99, the same price
as this was originally. And reportedly they
also offered a USB mouse that you could plug in right here but I've never actually seen
pictures of that or anything. Just mentions of it online. And of course if you want, I've actually taken off
this little panel here but when you first get the
thing that's covered up so where you can't remove the keyboard but yeah, you can, you just unscrew that and then it's just standard PS2 So if you use a PS2 Y splitter you can plug in a regular PS2 mouse and keyboard that way. Intriguingly, you can also
access the RAM right here. I don't think there's
any real benefit to it on this particular setup,
the way it is here anyway. But yeah, that is about it
really other than of course that delightful pizza key which was seriously sold as
one of the machine's key quirks and selling points honestly although it no doubt
caused some confusion, if the manual's anything to go by. With multiple sections
going over like well, what in the world is
the pizza key even for, and these little Q&A bits being like I was typing
something on the screen, all of a sudden it told
me to order a pizza. What's going on? Well you accidentally hit the pizza key and yeah, it's no wonder
'cause it's right there beside the daggum space bar,
kind of a prime location. Since I'm kind of talking about it anyway the keyboard itself is, it's not the worst, it's just extremely light and plasticky and it feels ridiculously cheap but that is to be expected considering how low cost
everything was on here. But you know, the key
caps themselves feel okay, they're kind of like three
quarter profile in height. The membrane is just rubber
domes, it's fine, nothing great. It's like a step below
late '90s Packard Bell, and of course there's
the mouse nub or disc, it works pretty okay for what it is. And it also has these two mouse buttons which you would think one
would be left and right but they both do the same thing. I thought maybe I was
just missing something but looking in the manual here, it says the action of pressing either one is how you click the mouse. So just whichever one you prefer. But yeah, as it was from
the factory out of the box, that's what you could do, which was, again, pretty neat at the time. But you know, for all their claims of this just being web without a PC or shrink wrapping and
packing up the internet to present to consumers in a convenient non-computer package, I mean it's still a computer. This is a PC inside. So let's take a look in there. [soft jazzy music] Well, that was significantly
more troublesome to get into than I thought it would be. I knew I had one of the later models here where they purposely made it difficult to get into to try and
prevent modification, but what a pain, anyway,
quite a heat sink. I guess it's all passively cooled. I thought there was a little fan in here but maybe that was just on earlier models. In terms of specifications, you can see a number of
things listed straight up in the manual, like the 800 by
600 display at 16,000 colors, 32 megabyte RAM with the built-in modem and all that kind of stuff. And there is the vague mention of an x86 200 megahertz processor. There we go. It's just a Socket 7. Oh yeah, that's very dry. It's not quite what I was expecting. So we have a Rise MP6 266 which is a Socket 7 CPU, but one that I actually haven't heard of and different than what
I read was in here. Yeah, I think mainly in the earlier ones you had one of these, an IDT win chip. So this is 180 megahertz version but 200 megahertz was also a thing and as this one would've normally had but I guess this is just called 266, it just says two times 100 megahertz bus. Yeah, the CPU is 266 megahertz rated but really 200 megahertz, it's 2x 100. So we have a Trident
CyberBlade i7 chip there for graphics. Of course there's a VIA chip too, couple of SanDisk chips down here for the flash storage presumably. There is the little IDE connector which is actually covered up on this one by this gigantic heat sink. They didn't want you using that. And I believe that right
there is the BIOS chip also locking things out on this version. Of course the RAM right
there, this dotter board here for the modem communication stuff. CR 2032 battery and yeah-yeh-you know, it's laptop stuff. It's just a PC and that's
what made it so appealing. And of course what ended up
being a lot of its downfall, at least on earlier versions where it was so easy to
bypass that flash storage and put whatever you want on here. And you know, seeing all this, that finally brings us to the point that I'm sure many of you are aware of and that is the fact that
this was such a low cost PC meant that the technologically-curious
and hardware-inclined snapped these things up for cheap and immediately started hacking away. You know, as soon as they got in there and saw what was going on, I mean, yeah, it was only a matter of time before people got the hardware
doing different things than it was intended and
slapped Linux on there or Windows 98 or whatever, man, it's an x86 architecture system, you can do pretty much
whatever you want with it. So it was not long before
that $99 initial price went up to $299. And you know what, it
still was losing money because it costs like
500 bucks to manufacture. So Netpliance scrambled to
adjust and tweak the hardware so that hopefully it
wouldn't be so easy to hack with middling results. Put a lock on something like this and people are just gonna
want to try to pick it. But you know, they still
had an IPO in March of 2000 and Netpliance stocks raised $144 million but it was not long before
they absolutely nose dived after the problems with the
system and its whole philosophy and hackability and many, many
other things came to a head and they lost $186 million
in the year 2000 alone. Ended up being traded for
pennies by April of 2001. Yeah, there was that
whole .com bubble bursting and all those kind of things. And you know what, just look
at this chart, it's so sad. This was in the newspaper back in the day and just like Netpliance is doomed. It came out that Netpliance would've had to have had 500,000 users to hit the break even point, all those people paying $21.95 a month. And instead at the peak it seems they only had around
50,000 paying monthly users. Eh, it's no surprise they
were just bleeding cash, their stock was in the toilet and they ended manufacturing and support of the i-Opener
in November of 2000 and stopped sales entirely
in January of 2001. Now EarthLink actually swooped in and bought the i-Opener service and took it over and
offered access for a bit. But you know, obviously that
wasn't even gonna last either. EarthLink shut it down
at some point in 2002 from what I can tell, probably around the time
that mine was last online in April or so. That being said, though, it wasn't all awful for the
people behind Netpliance. They went on to become
TippingPoint Technologies, completely pivoted their focus and they started doing security products and network intrusion prevention systems and they actually lasted
in some form until 2015 when the company was
purchased for $300 million by Trend Micro, who are very much still around with a net worth of like $6
billion as of July, 2023. Hence the TippingPoint
Threat Protection System, which is that's what that is. It comes from Netpliance or at least the people
that were involved with it. And well, that is about
it for this system, this video anyway, as much as I would love
to show the process of hacking this thing and getting another OS
on there of some kind, unfortunately, mine is
one of the later models that has a number of things
that have been adjusted to make modifying the OS kind of difficult from what I've read online. Not impossible, but just a little bit out
of the scope of this video. You know, there's BIOS updates and some hardware changes
and stuff like that. You do need a customized IDE
cable regardless of the model, which I do have. It just swaps around a number of the pins and you can actually
still get these online. I got this one on eBay,
but yeah, the BIOS changes and some other things
on the motherboard too. Yeah, I just don't have any
way to adjust that right now. So maybe in the future, we'll see, I would definitely love to get something else running on here so I can actually use this as like a weird little Socket 7 PC. But anyway, if you've ever had a Netpliance i-Opener in the past or maybe you still do or maybe you've modified one already and you know what the process is like, put some information in the comments, your story, whatever. I think it's fascinating,
this whole net appliance era. Yeah, it is still kind of fun to just see what it was supposed to do especially when they have
information cached on it. But it is about it for
this episode of LGR. I hope that you enjoyed
seeing this bit of nonsense, and as always, thank you for watching.
