General discussion • Re: What product would you like to see?

I will raise your VIC-20 with the UK101 or ZX80 :lol:

A friend had a (IIRC) ZX80 but bought it for $45 by mail after it was discontinued. Then he sent in a $50 mail-in rebate coupon, which was actually honored. So he was in effect paid $5 to take the computer off their hands. It's still the best deal I have even heard of to this date even if the ZX80 seemed a bit limited even at the time.

As for products which I would like to see, I miss the old headless Soekis boxes quite a bit and would like to see something like them once again, but based on the Raspberry Pi. Too bad the Soekris line was killed off by external factors. The base units (Net4501, Net4801, and Net5501) had multiple Ethernet ports and a PCI port for expansion plus GPIO pins. Back in the VSDL days, one I had at home used a VSLD modem in the port. Later, I replaced that modem with a 4-port Ethernet card which gave me 8 ports total — plus GPIO — for the home lab. So if we're talking wishes and daydreams I would like to see something similar but with 1 Gbps Ethernet, maybe based on a Raspberry Pi compute module. At work, a small router / mini server with GPIO is a powerful tool. One use, of many, was as a headless PXE jukebox to install from a choice of distros onto a stack of old PCs to thus allow remote work on bare metal, up to and including kernel modification. With the right additions, the GPIO allowed the old PCs to be powered on or off remotely and USB-to-Serial adapters let the consoles be accessible, too. Not a lot of RAM is needed, though non-volatile storage space is a must for that and many other use-cases.

Here's what the late, great Soekris Net5501 looked like:

• 433 to 500 Mhz AMD Geode LX single chip processor with CS5536 companion chip
• 128 to 512 Mbyte DDR-SDRAM, soldered on board
• 4 Mbit BIOS/BOOT Flash
• CompactFLASH Type I/II socket.
• UltraDMA-100 interface with 44 pins connector for 2.5" Hard Drive
• Serial ATA 1.0 interface for Hard Drive, with +5V and +12V power header
• 1 to 4 VIA VT6105M 10/100 Mbit Auto MDIX Ethernet ports, RJ-45, protected to 700W/40A Surge
• 2 Serial ports, DB9 and 10 pins internal header
• USB 2.0 interface, one internal, one external port
• Power LED, Disk LED, Error LED, Network LED's
• Mini-PCI type III socket. (for t.ex. hardware encryption or wireless controller)
• PCI Slot, right angle 3.3V signaling only, dual PCI slot option
• 12 bit general purpose I/O, 20 pins header
• Temperature and voltage monitor
• Hardware watchdog
• Board size 6.3" x 6.5"
• Power using external power supply is 6-25V DC, max 20 Watt, protected with TVS
• Option for 5V supply using internal connector
• Operating temperature 0-60 °C

Statistics: Posted by tpyo kingg — Wed Jan 07, 2026 2:21 pm

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