i-Opener 🍕The 1999 computer with a PIZZA KEY 

p i z z a

now that papa john's ordering site takes me back

That site went defunct in 2001.

That's crazy modern looking all things considered.

LOL, from the moment you mentioned it being a locked down system you could only use with their service I was pondering and meaning to write a comment about the possibility of replacing or bypassing the flash storage to boot a custom OS - I should have known that at such price it must have been something people already did back then. I really should, even though I had never heard of the system as I live in Finland, but that was always a thing with any such locked down devices that were fundamentally simply PC's disguised as something lesser... Such devices were simply guaranteed to pull in hackers like a light does moths - whether they actually needed another, probably crappier than their current one, PC's or not ;p

And then during the sleepover trying to stop the other kids from pressing the button a bunch of times before your parents kick all of you out of the computer room 😆

The pizza key being the Windows key is actually genius

Playing Freddie Fish and Putt-Putt games, man that was my childhood!

I loved playing Freddie fish!

Freddie Fish is the GOAT of point and click adventure games.

You had a custom keycap before custom keycap

That's amazing.

Back when the FTC still had teeth. *glares at Adobe*

If I was designing an Internet appliance like this, I’d have a small set of function keys that included a pizza key. One key to order Chinese, one for burgers, and maybe one for ordering breakfast. XD Can you imagine? Ordering pizza by pressing a goddamned pizza key?

@@MadameSomnambule like we cant do that now?

​​@@MadameSomnambuleI was actually Intrigued by that digital mall map. I think I'm gonna make a custom html doc to set as my start page that shows something like this with customized links to several online stores. Like, a guns section with Gunbot, Cabelas, Gunbroker etc., an electronics section (RIP RadioShack) and so on. It's gonna be awesome

​@@LeBoomStudios That sounds so fun.

👍😉💻

you: using the correct technical terms to describe a reverse engineering procedure me: *sniff sniff*

We need to.also dump the contents of the flash for preservations sake

It might just be a matter of setting up a fake dialup ISP with a phone line emulator and a decent modem that can be set up to accept any incoming connection attempt and a PPP/SLIP/whatever service that doesn't care about authentication.

@@treelineresearch3387 this plus wireshark

@@treelineresearch3387 That's not really needed. The builtin system is pretty easy to dump. It's just a flash IDE drive with a minimal QNX/proton install.

My pleasure! Love Hypnospace.

I'm sure you could still find an old model to get the experience of nostalgia if you wanted

I just bought one on ebay, bought the cable on ebay also.

How much horsepower does one of these have if you jailbreak them and put in Linux, would it be able to do Duke 3D?

@0neDoomedSpaceMarine Duke 3D had a minimum system of like 486DX 66 and 16 megabytes of RAM. These chips are well above 100mhz and with 32mb of RAM. On paper the machine should handle D3D comfortably.

@@megan_alnico Huh, that's actually not shabby. Given how these were sold off at a huge loss at 99bux for a time, and how easy it apparently was to put a real OS on there, these things must have been pretty good poverty desktops for the technically minded. Not a great screen, but hey, can't beat that 'subsidized' price.

I've finally found my spirit PC

Ordering pizza accidentally and get scared when the deliver is up to your door 🤔

Too bad it ordered Papa Johns, seems like blatant false advertisement.

@@RenegadePandaZ What did Papa John ever do to you?

​@@bibasik7 he aint Papa Louie

Amazon dash button launch version with branded buttons 😆

I just looked for a pizza key for the Glove80. Feels kinda essential now ... 🤔🍕

Would pay $ for some keycaps

The Pizza key goes in place of the AltGR key, it seems it would be simple enough to just put a Pizza sticker on there and configure the OS to open the browser on a internet pizza order website when the pizza key is pressed, you could probably use the Scroll Lock key instead as it's virtually useless nowadays and not likely to be pressed by accident

​@@jackmcslayI use AltGr almost every day! Pizza is expensive

Heck yeah, I’m glad you ended up sticking around! Best of luck on the classes.

Back when internet was about empowering individuals, not harvesting them for data

The 1960's sure were.

Indeed. It was a time when people appreciated the fact that there was an internet.

Yep and discovering free porn!

​@@cougar2013we still appreciate it today

I bought one of these as well. The original price was only $99. Thee's also a long forgotten story about Netpliance trying to stop us. They put epoxy on the BIOS, they modded the BIOS so it no longer booted from a second IDE drive, and they sent out scary sounding letter that they were going to try to charge us a bunch of money for not signing up for the ISP. They went out of business not long after all that.

@@stevesetherthey must work for Apple now.

You should also buy a bunch of XBoxes, Playstation and Switches. They sell them at a loss.

@@c1ph3rpunk It wouldn't surprise me. It gets worse. Looking back there's Slashdot stories about how they had to pay a $100,000 fine to the FTC for charging people for internet access before they used the device.

@@stevesether /. Now there’s one I haven’t seen in a while. ;-)

What about the performance? Did it ran decently?

God I remember those

Yep. The fact that Internet was still mostly dial-up in 1999 is what I believe kept these from catching on. They were ahead of their time. I'm glad they didn't catch on because I didn't like them.

Yeah, but 22 bucks a month in that era was excessive!

Loyalty bond is NEVER a new thing.

The concept though was pretty ahead of its time. Tablets these days fill the same niche, with the advantage of more prolific internet access.

I mean if that included the Dial-Up service, though it might have been expensive (I really don't know the prices from back then), a monthly payment would be justified, basically like todays flatrates and such.

Joke was them since they didn't make you sign up at the store during purchase, you just paid cash for your corpo-subsidized $99 linux box and drove off. Contract what contract, was that something in that documentation packet I didn't open or presented to me in the sign up workflow that I never ran?

@@treelineresearch3387 they had that thing in the box but everyone ignored it. Companies were just loading those things in cars and turning them into thin clients for their businesses. The concept was nice but the problem was that nobody cares about the rules. It was one of the most ridiculous times in computer history and sure brings back memories. I can almost garrantee there are prob still some in use

@@treelineresearch3387 Indeed, this was why the steep discounts for signing up for AOL or Prodigy when buying a computer at Best Buy integrated the signup and contract into the POS software at the store - you literally could not get the discount without signing. My older brother actually worked on that project.

They did eventually start forcing you to sign up for the subscription at time of purchase and put the early termination clause in, but for weeks (months?) we were able to just buy them from the store and never sign up.

There was a bit of time where that termination fee wasn't required. In fact, they got the attention of the FTC for forcing it on people mid-purchase. They basically got dunked on twice over it.

Its use-case was probably thought to be like modern smartphones, to quickly bring up the internet, to look up stuff and such, or order a Pizza, instead of waiting a minute for a computer to boot, connect to the internet and so on. That's basically the only thing this could do anyway.

well. The basic idea was that every home and buisness would one day have terminals and pay for the service. And the whole idea came from a former south american country that had a bunch of far far more primitive teminals installed in every building and used those terminals to track everyones wants, needs, and production, and hours avalible etc. Then they use an algorithm to predict and respond to demand, all without any investors, owners, C.E.O.'s or bosses, just demand. It worked so well that basically all of successfull wall-street companies hired a buuunch of merc's and ended the country before it could spread. Who wouldnt say yes to a (at the time) 15 hour work week average amoung workers, a lower retirement age, whatever job you wanted to try out, and everything locally made free to you otherwise? Cant have that, that sounds like communism. Right after the '60's no less! And they got away with it, there was a crime commited but no way to pursue.

This was Chile's Cybersyn, and it wasn't just Wall Street. Nixon ordered economic warfare against them; the CIA kidnapped high profile people; and Nixon, Kissinger and the govt at large knew about the coup against a democratically elected leader, but decided to let it go ahead because they considered his policies dangerous. Yep, sounds like normal American capitalism.

98SE and Winamp hold a spot in my heart.... Right in the napster era.

I also modded some resistors to run an AMD K6-3+ (that's been close to unobtanium even back then). I shall retrieve the unit from my attic now...

@@ollo1968 the K6-3 was the first CPU I delidded to try for better overclocks! I remember overvolting it to try and get 450 to work on my crappy motherboard, and I killed it and had to live with an over clocked Pentium 90 until I could save up for another cpu.

Yeah! Win98 and WinAMP set as the shell. No explorer. I got one of these used back then to build out a car MP3 player.

Are ya' referrin' to 2023? As far as Microsoft WINDOWS is concerned, they're still doing the flat 2D design they've had since WINDOWS 8 more than ten years ago. The distinction with WINDOWS 11's design is that they're curving more interface elements, and adding to the intensity and size of window and menu shadows. They aren't adding more texture, gradients, or doing any sort of 3D highlight and shadow kind of thing. Maybe you are referring to the early 2000s. :)

more polished 2d i would say. 3d element is so early 2000s

1990s. By 2001-2002, both Apple and Microsoft began with gradients and textured use. A sort of in between, in my opinion, between the hard 3D and the flat 2D. In the 1990s, you want to think of 3D designs like Motif with the beveled, thick and hard edges, the monochrome and gray color schemes, Windows 3.1-Windows 2000, NeXTSTEP, and Mac's System 8 and 9. These all featured those 3D designs, and were throughout the 1990s. With Apple's OS X and Microsoft's Windows XP, both from 2001, there was a fair move away from those like... industrial and appliance, hard and cold designs. I guess it was still "3D" imitation design, but softer throughout. It really is a hybrid area in terms of design, like 2001-2005. An in between. I feel really the 3D era didn't expire entirely until Microsoft's WINDOWS 8, and Apple's OS X Yosemite, from 2012 and 2014 respectively. You folks aren't wrong, I don't feel, but when I think "3D," I think that hard and cold look of the 1990s interfaces I described, rather than the glossy, bubbly, colorful world we had in the early 2000s. Then, of course, the late 2000s saw more changes. Apple threw out the skeumorphism, I think it's called, opting for smooth and subtle gradients and ditching textures. Softening all lines. And Microsoft did the whole 3D floating glass with Aero that saw 5-6 years of relevance. Although they don't do a great job of dating these things, I suggest to you ToastyTech's GUI Gallery if you're interested in seeing some of these interfaces. :)

Skeumorphism is what you're talking about. Apple and Kai Krausse were the pioneers of that particular style at the time.

Man, I miss skeuomorphism. It was very readable, looked better and more “premium” than flat design, and did a much better job at hiding “imperfections” on the screen (such as visible pixels on low-res displays or dust on the screen). Granted, as someone who’s working in a small family-owned software business, not having to employ a UI designer because everything’s so simple that I can just do it myself kinda works in my favor, lol.

Phone cords from the highway always have too much traffic

Both wild and farm-raised have their advantages. It all depends on if you're looking more for price or quality. You can't go wrong with organic telephone cords, however.

Same

Me too

Bind any key you like to a macro, that opens your favorite pizza place website, auto-logins and picks your saved order. Print a pizza sticker for the keycap, or have a keycap custom made.

Oh hey Lexi fancy meeting you here! Did not realize you were a LGR fan.

etsy has you covered (if you have a mech board)

As a uni student, that has happened many times before. Many... many times, often in the dead of night

Is there anyways to replace the windows key with it?

If the whole thing was cheap enough, it’s worth buying just to get the pizza key.

But aren't magnets dangerous to computers?

That's downright ghoulish wtf

Couldn't you just replicate a Pizza Key instead of stealing it off an I-opener

Smart fridge feels even more appropriate as its literally an internet appliance 😂

@@D3X1K_AXYZ-.-Now I'm imagining a refrigerator with the i-Opener's exact interface, but with like Netflix or whatever on it.

Chromebooks are pretty much today's equivalent!

​@@nitrax8629actually, yep. But it is linux based so it's actually a full os locked down to Google services..

@@D3X1K_AXYZit’s kinda missed opportunity for them not to make dedicated pizza button on the fridge, right?

Yeah, it might seem cheesy, but it's much easier to remember and navigate a physical layout than a list.

Hallelujah!

Much better than raining tacos

The battery was probably for the clock, so it probably doesn't work and the date is saved in the OS settings somehow. It's good that it hasn't burst though.

@@treennumbers it is booting from the flash memeory

The flash isn't _too_ surprising, though it might be kinda borderline.

Flash degrades with use. Not time.

@@kermitthefragg it does degrade with time as well, but we're talking many, many decades there.

2043: You can cook a pizza in your car parked in the sun.

@@patlefofort You can already do that in some Brazilian cities like Rio de Janeiro or Teresina. You have to be careful though to not cook your hands too picking it up (or holding the door handle to enter the car).

And remember that KFC thing, that combines (presumably) game console with an oven? or something? that unfortunately didn’t happen (

@@kaioocarvalho Pizza ovens are usually around 500 C, so more like Venus levels

​@@llMarvelous Officially, it's still "coming soon" as they've yet to come out and cancel it or say that it's a joke. The official site is still up even today. I'm still waiting for it, checking in from time to time. It'd make for a cool oddware.

The technology just wasn't there yet. There were wireless handhelds in the late 1990s and early 2000s, things like the Palm VII and early iPAQ, and then early smartphones. But at that point if you were looking to capitalize on the wave of people who wanted to take advantage of this "internet" thing they'd just heard of, they weren't going to be paying $40 per month for 10MB per month of mobile data service, they were going to be using it at home, dialing in over the phone line they already had. It's like when Netflix started. Maybe they saw online streaming on the horizon but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the way to make that business work was to mail DVDs to people. They could look forward to that streaming future but with internet speeds being what they were, it would have been difficult.

@@tetsujin_144 Well, Wi-Fi was already available back then, so they could've potentially made something like a primitive Wi-Fi-only tablet to use around the house or the office. But overall, yeah, this was around 8 years before the first iPhone, so mobile tech just wasn't ready for prime time. The problem with the appliance in this video is that it's basically a very crippled PC. It provided few advantages, except perhaps the price. Everything else could be achieved with an app on a regular PC.

apparently you have no idea how rare wifi was in the early 90s & 00s @@ironcito1101, it was almost entirely used for infrastructure links

Usable mass producible capacitive touchscreens simply didn't exist yet, let ALONE one this big, and a resistive touchscreen would have necessitated a stylus and made the device utterly HORRENDOUS to use (ESPECIALLY for typing). The technology for what you describe simply wasn't there yet in 2000-2001, you're about ≈5 years too early. 🤷 WiFi definitely existed (see the iBook), and would have been an awesome addition but it was REEEEEALLY expensive when it first came out. There's a reason Apple didn't offer Airport as standard on their laptops but made it a not-cheap optional add-on for years.

iPhone wasn't even Apple's first attempt at such a device; remember Newton? What iPhone did right was timing more than anything.

They are becoming less common nowadays, but they'll never completely go away unless something can replace them as the most powerful gaming device, most flexible development tool, etc.

​@renakunisaki That's the funny thing - the entire point of a net appliance was to reduce the functionality of the computer to a bare minimum. But it's really the versatility of the PC that keeps it going.

There've been endless "news, weather, stocks and shopping" services which existed or were promised all throughout the 1900s honestly. There was very little imagination about what such a thing could be, even while the internet was here and taking off, and basically zero thought for creators. They pretty much seemed to want it to be more convenient TV and radio and newspapers with home shopping. Basically no interest in communication or sharing of ideas or art. Thankfully it has flourished in that way.

​@@AeduoAww yes, I remember the internet of the 1950s. Good times was definitely better than the 1940s internet. Joking aside while I agree with your comment you might want to change it as "all throughout the 1900s" implies that the internet was available well, all throughout the 1900s. I think you mean the 1990s.

@@Gatorade69 yeah I was intending to include pre-internet services or promises of services.

@@Gatorade69😂

@@Gatorade69 If you really want to get technical, the Internet started around the late 50s and CERN/Tim Berner's Lee made it consumer friendly and what it is today in 1989-90 or so. What started as a military /research tool became a information and idea tool for all. :)

I was thinking from the beginning of the video - whose idea it was to place button there, can’t imagine no one thought of it

I have a Nuka Cola buttton on my keyboard.

@@Safetytrousers does it work properly?

I'm drinking cola right now.@@llMarvelous

There was briefly a Piizza Channel to order pizza from a Wii too.

If you think about it, a longer time passed from the time Clint got this to the time he made this video, than between when it was last used and when it got to Clint's hands.

I hope he is not like me I've had things in storage so long I forgot I even had them or bought them at Goodwills.

Well obviously it can't download mp3s or games or anything... edit: of course that's assuming you're running the hardware as/is Was it corn (replace c with p 😂)

Oh lordy he found the hidden corn button

Those pesky teenage boy hackers!

@@playlistenthusiast he was such an idiot too. At the time I was 7 and he was 12. He was in denial and kept insisting that mom had lied. He didn't realize that she could press the back button 20 or 30 times and see the recent history. She would get up a few minutes early several times just to check the history and verify that it was him getting naughty and no one else. She even showed him the back button and checked history right in front of him and he still denied it.

Managing browser history of a shared computer is something of a lost art these days; now everyone just uses their phone for that stuff.

One day, one day we will get that key...

I wonder how many people actually was searching for “any” key back in a day’s)

I kind of vaguely remember the first time I saw a pizza place with an online ordering option, I didn't quite trust e-commerce yet so I wasn't really comfortable with the idea and dismissed it as silly or something.

"it's not a computer!" Proceeds to list all the hardware specs of a computer 😂

Ha even cashier check out systems and atms are computers when people think about computers they think about a whole desktop cabinet when you say computer

My God, it’s full of stars…

@@ephektz It should be full of pizza.

Impossible because that's not how the pizza key worked. It's not like one of those amazon buttons that automatically order something.

​@@doigt6590Those are dumb af in my opinion for that very reason.

@@doigt6590 yeah I'm aware of this....

@@doigt6590 Those are such an incredibly stupid idea (but I'm sure they still made Amazon money SMH)

I remmeber it too. You could spend $200-$300 on this one device that did the job of what a low-end laptop from 5-6 years ago at that point could have attempted to do. Just made no sense. Course now it's different with iPads and all but still

They were probably good for people who found PCs too scary or challenging, also less hassle to keep this working at grandma’s place across town compared to a PC.

They were aimed at technophobes, and people who just wanted email and limited web browsing but who didn’t want or couldn’t afford a full fledged PC.

@@PhillyMJS Oh I understand who these were meant for, but that doesn't change the fact that even for what they were meant to do with their limited functionality they were not good devices.

That's funny, because to someone born past their time like me. They seem less like useless junk than nowadays' IoT devices

The thing is, most "smart devices" still require a general-purpose computer such as a PC, smartphone or tablet to function. And even if your smartphone is somewhat limited and locked down compared to a PC, it's still worlds more capable than these Internet appliances.

2 days for me and that's still unheard of lol

I was going to say... if you're not "feeling" Dominos the day after... clearly you ordered somewhere better.

Any pizza can be a personal pan pizza if you try hard enough and believe in yourself.

@@mybike1100 and it was heavenly. Just gunna do a water fast today though lol

I literally just finished a Pizza Hut sausage and pepperoni and I am feeling it.

Was gonna say the other night I ordered me a whole large papa John's pizza myself

It was the only thing that I saved when I had to leave my iOpener in Boston when I moved to Los Angeles in 2011. That keyboard has lots of hidden treasures, and not the good kind of hidden. Notice there is no 'esc' key? That way you have to use some other keyboard if you flash the storage to something else and need to edit. Also the PS/2 splitter wiring is reversed: you have to plug the keyboard into the mouse port and v/v. That said, these machines were otherwise a BLAST to hack! My friend and I flashed them into X terminals using Linux Terminal Server Project and a dual-P3 server for a convention. They were a hit.

Then how would you order pizza? I guess you didn't think this comment through

​@@NiberspaceDoom is better pizza than Papa John's

Dominoes would be a different story

Imagine a confused uncle getting pissed while thinking someone keeps pranking him w pizzas at odd times of night, and then panicking when he realizes the person ordering the pizzas must have his compkete credit card into and address.

@@scotth5088 Pizzas randomly show up at grandma's house, as she orders pizza for the grandkids occasionally and her cat walks on the keyboard too.

Pizza instantly delivers by Pneumatic mail :)

(3D Pizza Printer Drone Has Arrived at Your Location!)

Hi! How you can clean the yellow color? 😊

​@@Radu_NGRetrobrite. See: The 8-Bit Guy

Some people use a hydrogen peroxide bath and UV light (such as the sun) to un-yellow it, but it's still debated whether this is an effective method and whether it's good for the plastic.

It needs to be benchmarked and compared to Pentium

From my knowledge, this is known as being 'superscalar' - executing more than one instruction per clock cycle through different pipelines. The idea came about in the 1960s and was employed on later supercomputers until it made its way to commercial chips in the late 80s. The Pentiums for instance did the same. Impressive for a dinky budget chip, but pipelines being leveraged was common by that time.

Iunno... Same odds that MJD and Action Retro released videos on that touchscreen iMac within hours?

Dude... so glad someone else saw this too. Kinda lame of LGR to see someone else working on a similar topic and going like "I have to be first to release a video on this"

It was likely in the pipeline at the same time.

@@hustla818this has been out for LGR patrons for almost a week now so he was first

​@@hustla818what a weirdly conspiratorial comment

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed!

"...jazz music with extra cheese..." in the captions?! Hilarious! Follow through and attention to detail separate the 'greats' from the crowd. @@LGR I only saw that by accident on my desktop.

@@larrydanna LGR intros are so soothing. Especially for late nights

Likewise, I've had it on my project table for ages and just recently got it out again to cover since I saw no one had really made in-depth videos about it. Wild coincidence indeed. Looking forward to seeing the video and I hope yours had some fun stuff cached on it!