My first experience with the internet was in the early 90s, when our high school computer science class went to a programming competition held at one of the state universities. While wandering through the library I came across a gopher terminal attached to the campus mainframe. It wasn't much, and at one point I thought I locked it up, but tapping through hyperlinks on that amber monochrome display felt pretty amazing to me at the time.
emilmuzz
joined 2 years ago
I'll second this as someone who used to administer an AMI headend. This is essentially an industrial wifi access point. This device connects to the utility's operations network, and provides connectivity to smart meters in the area.
While I never had one I remember following the build page, and I was crushed when the price point was far too high for me to even consider getting one. However I did ride around with a carputer for some time before an affordable commercial head unit with CD/MP3 capability became available.
It was an off the shelf IBM desktop in the backseat, powered by an inverter, and controlled by a numeric keypad stuck to the center console with some velcro. Getting music on it required hauling the whole thing in the house, but at the time it felt pretty awesome to have pieced together a solution that worked.