i-Opener

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The i-Opener was a low-cost internet appliance produced by Netpliance (now known as TippingPoint) between the years 1999 and 2002.

The i-Opener is generally regarded as a business failure because of poor sales. The hardware, cheaply available, became popular among collectors who modified the appliance to run as a normal PC. This made the device capable of running typical PC operating systems, such as Linux and Microsoft Windows.

The original retail price was $99. The actual cost of the device was roughly estimated between $300 and $400. The devices were sold as a loss leader for monthly Internet service. However, as soon as a hacking method became available on the Internet (in 2000), many customers cancelled the monthly service, which eventually made the business model unsustainable. Similar business model and failure are also found in the 3Com Audrey and Virgin Webplayer.

[edit] Hacking

It was not too long before an engineer from Las Vegas, Ken Segler, discovered that the i-Opener was simply an x86 compatible PC inside a fancy case. By removing the back cover of the device, he found a Socket 7 CPU socket, with an IDT WinChip C6 180 MHz CPU, a SDRAM SO-DIMM socket, a 44 pin IDE plug (which allowed adding a hard drive and CD drive converting the appliance into nothing less than a $99 PC with a LCD screen), and a SanDisk 16 MB Chip. However, the pins on the connector were reversed, and required making or ordering special cables and adapters to connect a drive to the unit. Attempts by i-Opener to thwart hacking included gluing the BIOS chip with epoxy and modifying its settings rendering it unable to detect hard drives, limiting the type of CPU one could use to that included with the unit, and even cutting the pins on the IDE connector.

[edit] External links