3com Ergo Audrey - Failed Year 2000 "Internet Appliance" - Demo and Teardown 

We had a family friend going up that had one of these in the kitchen kinda a neat thing to see when we still had CRT monitors everywhere it looked sleek. When Amazon launched the show awhile back I was thinking of the Aurdry and how truly similar they are...

real player... you have not been missed.....

Great video. Had two of these that were hacked to the updated 6.1 QNX and used for media streaming, a digital picture frame, and more. I had them play media through SMB on the ethernet adapter (Belkin) to a D-Link wifi client, all neatly tucked behind the Audrey. Other than voice operation, the hacked images and lots of additional customization allowed a lot of what people use Amazon Echo or tablets for, with a more stylish exterior. I bought them for about $100 each at auction (NIB) when they first went bust--one got stolen along with a first-gen Sony Aibo in a break in and the other is still in my closet. I consider pulling it apart and while I know the processor is way underpowered, I hope that someone with more time than me comes out with a new CF image that wedges something other than QNX on it and randomly search the internet at least once a year in vain. My second desire is to rip it apart and replace it with Raspberry Pi internals, hooking up as many physical features as possible (buttons, dial, and clear LED-lit pen [which I'd try to figure out a way to make capacitive without too much interference with the light]). Time hasn't allowed this mod, however.

this thing is just sooooooo 2000 and it's AWESOME

Remarkably similar marketing angle to Siri or that Amazon home thingy. The front image on the box has even been anthropomorphised. Fascinating. Thanks Cam!

So, it's a Chromebook...

picture of a hotdog... I think 3Com got on the snapchat filter *before* it was cool.

Looks like you could remove the original motherboard, shove a Raspberry Pi in there and run all the goodness associated with that. You would need adapters for the display but I'm sure someone could whip it together fairly easily. Heck, you could 3d print a new back plate and everything!

about the compact flash thing- your cards need to be 32 mb or else they won't work.

Fascinating! So many ideas, so may products... I enjoyed every second of it.

I remember seeing those in stores back in the day; I couldn't see any use for it myself, since I had the Packard-Bell PC I had gotten in late 1999 at a pawn shop. I thought it was weird that it was wider at the top than at the bottom and its odd shape meant you couldn't carry it around like a laptop. Devices like the Audrey were a classic example of something that was ahead of its' time; wi-fi wasn't around yet and touch screens were a novelty for consumer use so they weren't well-supported by software. PC prices had started dropping tremendously so people preferred to get one of those instead; they cost a little more than something like the Audrey but they could do a LOT more. The situation reminds me of the short-lived UMPC craze years later; the idea was sound but the execution wasn't all that good. UMPCs were costly and were cumbersome to use and had limited battery life; for most things a laptop was better. Of course eventually technology and the wireless infrastructure caught up; the iPad came out and the rest is history.

The UI kinda reminds me of the GUI in The Sims 3 for some reason. I can see many similarities in the appearance of buttons and the sort of blue look.

I seem to recall QNX being touted as a possible OS for the Amiga, when things were getting shaky after Commodore's demise. There was a demo disk released on an Amiga magazine, too. Oh, and the 44 dislikes? These are from all the world's Ergo Audrey users, unable to view the video.

Wow, it sends uncompressed wav files over dialup to allow voice e-mail! At some point during the 30 minutes it would take to send your brief voice message, you probably would conclude it was quicker to just make a phone call.

Oh god, what a forgotten relic. I mean really forgotten. I remember going to Best Buy and Circuit City that year and seeing these things on display near the PCs. Nobody touched them.

Looks like she could use an LED backlight modification, I've seen TheSignalPath do it with his test equipment and it doesn't look too difficult.

This is the most early 2000’s thing I’ve ever seen...

This seems like something that would be funded on Kickstarter, hell even the box screams it.

That six pin header was probably for a standard mouse and keyboard jack. Some used a splitter that used extra pins but had standard PS2 connectors on the other end.

That's pretty cool, never heard of it before. I'm usually a sucker for those sort of pointless devices, think I owned more PDA's than ive had hot dinners, yet never really had much use for them other than a large mp3/mp4 player - but I just liked the fact no one really had one! Nice to hear another local accent on youtube lol!

These were the spiritual predecessor to the tablet. Conceptually ahead of its time technologically not ready.

The Internet Appliance is back. They are now known as smartphones, tablets and chromebooks.

Looks like a year 2000 kickstarter project.

The unpopulated "6-pin" header is MiniDIN PS/2 for PS/2-keyboard and Mouse. It surely was prepared for Ethernet. The from footprint is for the ethernet controller and the back ones for magnetics.

I'd be curious if those PCBs were meant to be dual purpose, possibly for retail store signage. Considering its' expandability and VGA port, and possible layout for flash on the board. That little thing could have run a kiosk or similar for a decade.

Talked my mom into buying one of these so I could use the desktop we had for gaming.

I have a HP touchpad, but I am also glad to see a good video on one of these, prior to this I have only heard of them and had seen pictures

I remember seeing similar sorts of things that connected to your TV, an internet box with keyboard

So this was one of the things 3Com was doing when Palm became an independent company. Interesting that this could sync with a Palm PDA (I bet the folks at Palm tried to keep that idea alive with the Foleo later on) Looks like thins has a passive matrix display (bleh)

GREAT VIDEO! Amazing how a ton of companies got taken out when the dot-com crash happened in the early 2000s! I remember going to an internet cafe and using dial up to check anime stuff when I was a kid. My parents had an old Compaq pc from 93 or 94 and it could not use the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s/ I did not get another PC until around 2004

I wonder if one of the reasons this thing failed could be the price? ($500!)

Very cool video! I would have liked to see the media playback functionality and especially the VNC viewer, but thats ok!

You got mail

Where's the scribble mode in the terminal though?

And now with chromebooks internet appliances have finally taken off. 16 years later!

Does the instruction manual that the IR Coms module is a Class 1 laser device.

Love your vids, Cheers!

Is there any chance anyone has the latest firmware with the shell vulnerability of the Audrey? I found one cheap but it has an old firmware and the shell vulnerability doesn't work..

I wonder what Ethernet controller it would've used if it had been populated.What happens if you try to insert a USB flash drive in one of the USB ports.Can the CF slot be used as a removable mass storage drive to, say, view images from a camera on?If I had one of these I would definitely try adding a VGA port and a battery holder for a CR2032 coil cell in the BT1 position.

Just found your channel, and really cool video, and back in the late 90's threw the early 07 here in the US I had 2 POTS lines in my house one for normal telephone use with long distance, and one that could only dial local #'s for Internet ISP use, as we did not get broadband in my area till late mid/late 07, but I can remember the days of growing up, and my parents saying damn it get off the internet I need to make a phone call lol!. So yeah I can see why these things failed, but now we have kind of gone back to these things with devices like Chromebooks that are meant as low cost computers for getting on the Internet, and doing Internet things.

"Unauthenticated SMTP" "Unencrypted" ಠ_ಠ

These teardown videos are really interesting. Could you try and get some more strange computers and stuff from the past and open them up?

Couldn't you use the e-mail server to relay e-mails to and from the internet? So like if you wanted to send an e-mail through your gmail account, couldn't you have the mail server pc grab e-mails coming from the Audrey and send them through your gmail account? and also receive e-mails from gmail and relay them to the Audrey?

I found out about this OS hack last night and downloaded everything I could find that was not a dead link but honestly can't find a way to install the IMAGES of these qnx hacks into a regular PC with a compact flash card based SSD(eide adapter). Or at least allow to install the image on a usb to flash card adapter CF card that I can plug into a thin client cf card bootable slot. Does anyone know how to write these OS images to CF cards in a windows 7 machine??

Greetings from the U.S. Just subscribed... That caller ID function is something that I need. I see that you're a Linux user. Do you know if there's a caller ID program available for Linux? I generally use a Frankenstein version of Ubuntu called Ultimate Edition, and the computer that's always on has a V-92 modern. I've tried getting a MS Windows caller ID program to work through Wine, but had no success. The shell loads without any functionality. Let me know if you know of anything. Thanks.

Perhaps the second USB port was for if you had a USB cradle for your PDA instead of a Serial one?

It really looks like one of those "Navi" we can see in Lain.

websites hit their peak around 2000, since then, its java buttons, ads all over, and the web is slower and harder to make webpages for

I quite like this device - for older people getting to know the Internet, it would be a good start. Its price was rather high, however. A device such as this was bound to be short-lived

any gaming possibilities, emulation if a calculator can run doom why not?

Interesting video Cameron.. Thanks. My career in IT started around 1996-7, and I remember units like this come and go (although I'd never seen this one). I find it fascinating to look back at products like this. It's fun to look back (and have a laugh) at tech that failed, but it's also interesting that it was these many failures that tested the waters for what would ultimately work as marketable and practical products. Tech dev for for the home market was exploding (sometimes literally!) around the late 90's and early 2000's. I wonder if we'll ever see such a time of scrabbling for tech supremacy again?!

I recon it might be possible to exchange the mainboard with an an rasberrypi 3 or something hmmm

Through some quick googling it looks like no one wrote a DOOM port for this thing, which sounds like a damn shame. Not that it would really be playable with that LCD screen though.

What? You could not sync your Palm with IR? No wonder it didnt take off. /s

Interesting device. I think it would have done better if it came out of the box with some multi media functionality. But then again it was the year 2000.

The packaging and presentation look really modern.

The plastic part you mounted the keyboard on seems over-engineered to simply be to hang the keyboard from. Can it also be used to tilt the keyboard in use?

Really great video! Just one question: Can you also place the original firmware on it and give us a look on it?

Omg that ghosting

Linen is a colour?

I was on the support team for this product. I can assure you, you just violated your warranty opening it up.

great video !! love those old machines , whats sort of lenovo laptop do you use ?

Are there any games on this? Dos?

Why dont you extract the OS files

I just got to the end of the video. As I said earlier, I can confirm. My friend was in product manager, and he told me that they were going to add Ethernet, but decided against it last minute. That’s why it has the provision for Ethernet. Our company founder, literally INVENTED Ethernet!!

15:16 is that i3WM on the right?

Nice tiling WM on that laptop. Looks like i3 or Awesome?

Some older version of FreeBSD might work; there where a driver for Trident at some point.

Amstrad in the UK offered something similar. In fact I'm sure one used to feature on the reception desk in very early episodes of "The (UK) Apprentice!"

When I was in Englad in 2002 I remember on high street they hand kind of a Atm style computer for accessing the internet on the street with a stainless steel keyboard.

Is that a passive matrix display ?

I can only just remember something about these. I'll have to see if I can get one to hack for in my kitchen.

But will it run Crysis?

I reckon it looks quite a good and functional device.

Are you from Scotland by any chance

Goddamnit... a flashing email button. I thought they existed only in Knight Rider, MacGyver, and such.

Winamp is still the king

You can buy new chinese CF cards from aliexpress or alibaba that are like 4GB or smth down to 512 MB from what i see, might want to look into one of those for this maybe

I guess we can call it the precursor of modern tablets and smartphones, as a device to easily access the internet with. It would have been a much more successful device if it came a few years later, when people already using broadband internet connection, and facebook became popular. It's running on an x86 processor, I wonder if anyone had in mind to hack Windows on that thing.

The product seems very similair to the sony e-villa, which was an internet appliance running an embedded version of BeOS. That product also failed in the marketplace and was also discontinued after a few months. It also came out around the same time. I guess these products where just about 10 years too ahead of their time, it wasn’t until the first Ipad that the design vision of these devices became realised and usuable. But for that to become a reality, the smartphone had to be invented first as well as other technologies suchs a wifi and decent touch screens to make it usable. Also a modern Ipad can do so much more then these internet appliances of the early 2000’s. These vision was there, but market wasn’t quite ready for it.

maybe you should try adding temporary wires to slots for the ports (like maybe the vga port that has its provisions already) and adding a connector on.

Anyone reminded of the Chumby?

can it run crysis?

The only casualty of Y2K

Growing up in San Francisco, I mostly just knew 3com as the company with the naming rights to Candlestick Park. Never actually knew what they did or sold, just had a vague idea they were some generic tech company.

2:34 -- That says "Opertational" XD

excellent video! Takes me back to a different time when I was a boy and things weren't so complicated.

UK internet in most places is like from 2000 compared to europe, and O2 mobile internet is slow as 1995.... even its 3g mostly or 4g in cities and towns...

You can tell they were quite proud of this.

Also, 0.8W to 1.2W! Holy crap, 200MHz on that kind of power budget.

Eyyy I have one of those Touchpads! Sadly it's still my main piece of mobile technology Thanks dad

Subscribed, only for the ThinkPad and Motherloving i3 window manager. Get some.

Will not be opertational even :)

In 2008 or so our local internet provided proposed something like that. A combined Modem/mini computer box where you would plug in your monitor and keyboard and mouse so as to use the internet. It was meant for poorer people who could not afford a real computer but it never took off.

Hello, fellow i3wm user!

"metal cover covering everything". RF shield. it's called RF shield.

That is a big RF shield! Cancer! ;) And... that is a National Semiconductor Geode!

Same keyboard as the Amstrad phone

I remember these. Technically it's a computer / thin client.

Looks like something you could build a ras-pi into