ah! i knew somebody else had seen the book i was talking about (see my previous post.. somewhere up there ^^^). it was a great idea - you get all the mac you need, and only that much, no wasted components. you could even get additional CPUs for it, including, possibly, an x86 card to add DOS (at the time) or other OSes (sic) into the mix.
anyhoo, i did a couple of googles for the prototype you described, and all the jonathans i find are in reference to mr. Ive.
i seem to remember seeing it in a book at design school, maybe this one. it was an idea for either the first macintosh or the macII line that never got produced. maybe it was by frogdesign, or it might have been apple industrial design *shrug*
anyhow, it consisted of a bunch of smallish - 6 inches or so square and different thicknesses as necessary - black boxes that plugged together with something akin to PCI (or i guess NuBus at that point). to install, you would pop off a panel that covers the port on the top of the existing component, then plug the bottom of the new component into it, stacking up little black boxes.
you would buy the CPU component, that had the CPU and power supply in it, and a couple of ports on the back, (and a monitor, keyboard and mouse, etc) and then add on other black boxes for hard drives, floppy disk, etc. to add on another drive, you just buy another black box and pop it on the top. add another serial port or four, external SCSI, another video card? pop. pop. pop. this way, you built a tower if you needed one, or a minitower if that's all you needed. a hardcore user could build a box as tall (or long, if you sat it on its side) as he wanted...
what i remember reading - and anybody who owns the book in question, please correct me - was that the technology was really experimental, the expansion ports could only address a certain number of components (like scsi, but more than 3 bits, methinks), and to go beyond that limit would require another epansion box. it looked really cool, and the concept was completely unlike anything at the time.
but of course, it never got produced, though there was at least a prototype or models made (hence the photos in the design book). anybody out there that can back me up on this, or at least correct my highly fallible memory?
According to Steve Jobs the top 3 things we asked for were put into this new design. 1. Flat Panel screen 2. G4 processor 3. Superdrive (DVD burner on one of 3 models)
they forgot #4, and i think the loudest of the reactions to the old design: a 17'' screen.
they can very easily upgrade the new line with a 17'' option - and i think it will be the first thing they do when they revamp the line in a few months (along with dropping the price). look at it: just lengthen the swing arm a bit and put a larger display at the end of it; hell, it's almost something a user could do on his own...
whatever. i'm a newton user, and i think it's an important feature. i use it all the time to record snippets of meetings, songs, ideas, etc.
the killer app for the newt was always its handwriting recognition, even when it didn't work, everything else was secondary to the interface and the HWR
trademarks? think different.
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
people are falling all over themselves to make clear that apple doesn't have "iWalk" trademarked or whatnot.. maybe that's just the leaked name.
remember Apple still owns all the trademarks and copyrights to the Newton and the Newton OS.
though the new product (if it's indeed the real mccoy) likely has no roots at all in the venerable ol' Newt, it may still carry the name. who knows? stranger things have happened in cupertino...
no, but the newton did. it had (or has, if you still have one) a built-in microphone. and it had all of 4 megs (more or less, depending on whcih version you had)
voice recording is a major feature if you ask a newton user, and i'd be disappointed myself if there wasn't some way to do it in a new apple PDA
a built-in mic would be preferable if all you're doing is taking voice notes, but a real audio-in could capture music and anything else you can plug in, so that's an improvement (i guess)
it seems to me that headlines and press releases like this are simply Websidestory and Statmarket's way of getting their names in the news.
here's the ploy:
say something inflamatory (even if wildly inaccurate) about linux. get story picked up by web news services. get linux users up in arms. reap benefits of "even bad publicity is still publicity" reality.
9ish this morning, a voice from the next office...
"hey [my name here]"
"yeah?"
"i got this weird attachment in my hotmail account. you think it's a virus?"
"maybe. do you know who it's from?"
"yeah"
"what's the file name?"
"gone dot ess see are."
".scr? a screensaver?"
"yeah. and the message is all weird. the grammar and spelling are really bad."
"screensavers are just executables anyway... and the grammar's bad? yeah. that's a worm"
"okay. i deleted it"
"i am so proud of you!"
finally, i'm gettting through to the people in my office. they know almost as well as i do how to spot a new worm on the prowl. shortly after she got rid of the first instance in her hotmail account, my mailbox started sprouting them like.. um.. mushrooms on cow pies. yeah.
melissa and all her bitches, and now sircam and the like have taught joe user his lesson (over and over, the lesson), so the more this kind of stuff happens, the better prepared we are.
i asked once a while ago - and nobody was able to answer - whether it was possible or feasible to route audio signals over an ethernet network. my goal was to be able to have ethernet speakers with a sound source plugged into the network as well.
my idea was spurred by the fact that my new office has ethernet in every room, but to get sound from the MP3 music server into those rooms, it would either require streaming the signal over the LAN (and each box would have its own buffer lag.. ugh) or else run speaker wire through all the rooms as well. why not use some portion of the ethernet standard to pump an audio signal through?
so, it looks like somebody did me one better, and made an ethernet-enabled guitar and amp.
so, when do i get to buy a receiver with 10/100 and a bunch of speakers with RJ45 jacks on them?
oh, i thought it said the NeXT interface. nevermind.
honestly, though, it would be really nice when some of the mainstream OSes adopt the option to use alternative file browsers, whether for the cutting edge geeks to see their files as quake maps, or for more specialized users to see things as they are more properly arranged, or, and this is where i think the research ought to be going, handicapped users being able to "see" their data in ways that are more appropriate for those without certain assumed abilities.
the real "next interface" will be here when there is an interface that a blind user can use to browse his hard drive as fast or faster than a sighted person can use the current stock of file browsers - instead of using some kludgy add-on or adaptive technology working with a file browser built for a sighted person.
Shin is looking for an actor whose voice resembles Lee's voice to read his lines; he says it's a relatively simple task to digitally doctor the voice to make it a near-exact replica of Lee's voice.
...
Shin also has a short list of Asian martial arts performers who have learned to imitate Lee's moves very closely. He plans to film them using motion capture equipment that he can then incorporate into his digital Bruce Lee models -- giving fight sequences a natural flow.
so.. he's going to have a Lee talkalike and a Lee fightalike, and potentially a Lee lookalike (for wide shots and such). so why not just use them, and traditional photography, instead of trying to resurrect Bruce Himself through technology? Hell, Brandon Lee did an admirable job in his shot at it.
the result would likely be a better homage to Lee, and less the necropheliac masturbation that has been the result of similar efforts thus far.
let the dead stay dead, dammit. especially the dead guys we liked when they were alive.
silly me, i thought the range for 802.11b was supposed to be 150 ft. you must live in a ridiculously tall house, or have a lot that's several acres in size to be complaining about range. the example i remember is that if you stick a base station in the middle of a (american) football field, you'd get a signal all the way to both goal lines.
now, if you have some kind of interference, then you're SOL. as for me, i've never had any problems with the range in my average-sized home, or in my average-sized back yard between my base station and my ibook, whereas my cordless phone breaks up walking out the back door.
what have these guys been smoking? oh yeah, here it is in the article:
"Peter Meyers, a professor of physics at Princeton University who was not part of the research team, said the finding is the "sort of crack" that "has been sought for many, many years."
how utterly irresponsible and ridiculous that HeUnique insists that we "Grab it while you can."
encouraging the slashdot community to go and download a piece of code that breaks a well-known and popular security methodology, quite possibly breaking the law in the process, simply because they can? how infantile and myopic.
oh, it's not that i object to the public breaking another MS Standard, or the ease with which the source is now distributed around the 'net.. i'm concerned for the poor schmuck who runs the webserver that is now so totally and irrevocably screwed by the slashdot effect.
i installed it on my lcII - it's nice to see the latest software version of something running on a 10 year-old low-end machine - and it's been good training on hacking on my OS X machine's BSD guts. i'd only been exposed to linux (well, and solaris and hp/ux at school) before.
hell, it even runs X (as in X windows) at 1 bit color on the tiny 12'' apple monitor perched on top.. it's wicked slow, but it's fun to see netscape and a couple of xterms compiling things (don't bother, it takes overnight for simple programs), the little LC Ethernet card (from welovemacs.com) going crazy, hard drive churning away... ahh
Alpha is gone, PA-RISC is going, what's going to be left? MIPS? SPARC? AMD? Crusoe? "
*cough* PowerPC *cough*
IBM is still running quite hot with the power4, and motorola, though they have their heads up their asses, is assisting them with the next gen PowerPC.
yes, there's still MIPS and SPARC.. and even AMD (though they're essentially an x86 clone).. and what do they all have in common? they're not controlled by Intel, for one, but they're also all.. wait for it.. RISC
even the next gen intel chips are going risc-ish.
okay, no more martinis in the early afternoon for me...
I think you mean any other platform, except the Windows platform, right?
no. i mean any platform. my logic may be flawed, but it goes like this: i can play any game made for mac - ever (considering i can still play games made for OS 6.0.x, some of which need a mac plus emulator to run on a PPC), any game available via MAME, all the console emulators, and any title made for linux/unix as well (thanks virtualPC and darwin), and almost all the games ever made for DOS or Windows. sure, there are 3D games that are slow (but still play) and some recent titles i can't play in emulation, but those are almost all available in mac native form. so i add it up (of course, i have no actual numbers...) and come up with more games than you.
this is the point where i stick out my tongue and walk away.
i already have a portable playstation, and mine has better battery life. plus, it can play SNES, NES, gameboy, genesis, hundreds of arcade games, just about any PC game, and, oh yeah, any game they make for linux or Mac.
it can emulate just about anything you throw at it, since it has a spiffy, wicked fast processor inside (not the fastest in the world, but it'll do in a pinch), and it has enough keys and buttons in the built-in controller to bind to even the most complicated of game controllers - plus USB to connect additional players if you like. the best part, though, apart from the ~5 hour battery life - and only a little less under heavy load, even spinning CDs, i've found - is the amazing thin, small, high-definition LCD screen. it's a thing of beauty. another perk is that it has the ability to play games over the internet, wirelessly, with 802.11 (though the manufacturer refers to it as "airport")
yep, it's an iBook.
a little heavier (but not much!), and more general-purpose than the portable PS1, but infinitely more useful:) through the power of emulation, i have a completely portable machine that i can use to play more games than any other single platform.
so take these stories about a portable this, a hacked up that, or a MAME the other, and stick them.. well, i don't care where you stick them.
certainly it's at a YDC and not at a federal, pound-you-in-the-ass penitentiary, but still, eight months.
that's a full year of school you'd have to miss, and take again with kids 2 years younger than you. and a year after _that_ you still wouldn't be able to leave the state or be out after curfew.
imagine you're back in high school, and remember the pain of persecution and social awkwardness of being a geek. add to that the weekly visits to your parole officer, and think that's not at least a little trying for a kid who, essentially, downloaded some software and ran it.
personally, i think it's light in comparison to the damage and loss of commerce in dollar amounts floating around from the "Attack" - and i hope his parole terms include not being able to use the Internet unsupervised - but considering the age of the of the offender with no priors (i presume) this isn't "ridiculously easy" or a wristslap. a wristslap would be a fine (which his parents have to pay) and maybe parole.
being confined to a cell, your movements and actions constantly under scrutiny for eight months, essentially without any liberties, is an appropriate sentence for someone who intentionally committed a severe act of vandalism. the travesty would be giving the same sentence, or less, to people who maim or kill while drunk behind the wheel of a car, which happens every day in the courts.
linked from the article in the story, this story has an excellent perspective on why finding life on mars, even microbial, very primitive life.
to quote:
The discovery of extraterrestrial life of any size would likely be one of the most significant events in the history of humanity. Such a finding, particularly if within our own Solar System, would suggest that life is common throughout the universe and that the terrestrial biosphere is not a hopelessly rare phenomenon.
i came across an elegantly intuitive, yet powerful, extensible UI the other day at the mall. yep, in the Discovery Channel Store, hanging on the rack with all the other knicknacks and doojobbies, there it was.
in essence, it's a PIM for kids in the form factor of a keychain about the size of a stick of gum.
on one end (left) was the keyring, and a small button inset into the front next to the LCD screen - 3 lines by about 24-30 characters.
the other end was a large button that, when twisted one way, functioned to scroll up, the other way to scroll down. when pressed, the button performed an action (enter)
with these three simple functions and the mode switching of the small button at the left, it accomplished every function of a PIM - including giving me my horoscope and telling my fortune. i learned how to use it within the thirty or so seconds i was playing with it before i was distracted by the 76-in-one multitool on the next shelf over.
my point? did i have one?
oh yeah. more than a few developers can take a lesson from a $5 keychain that got it right with just two buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
ah! i knew somebody else had seen the book i was talking about (see my previous post.. somewhere up there ^^^). it was a great idea - you get all the mac you need, and only that much, no wasted components. you could even get additional CPUs for it, including, possibly, an x86 card to add DOS (at the time) or other OSes (sic) into the mix.
anyhoo, i did a couple of googles for the prototype you described, and all the jonathans i find are in reference to mr. Ive.
i seem to remember seeing it in a book at design school, maybe this one. it was an idea for either the first macintosh or the macII line that never got produced. maybe it was by frogdesign, or it might have been apple industrial design *shrug*
anyhow, it consisted of a bunch of smallish - 6 inches or so square and different thicknesses as necessary - black boxes that plugged together with something akin to PCI (or i guess NuBus at that point). to install, you would pop off a panel that covers the port on the top of the existing component, then plug the bottom of the new component into it, stacking up little black boxes.
you would buy the CPU component, that had the CPU and power supply in it, and a couple of ports on the back, (and a monitor, keyboard and mouse, etc) and then add on other black boxes for hard drives, floppy disk, etc. to add on another drive, you just buy another black box and pop it on the top. add another serial port or four, external SCSI, another video card? pop. pop. pop. this way, you built a tower if you needed one, or a minitower if that's all you needed. a hardcore user could build a box as tall (or long, if you sat it on its side) as he wanted...
what i remember reading - and anybody who owns the book in question, please correct me - was that the technology was really experimental, the expansion ports could only address a certain number of components (like scsi, but more than 3 bits, methinks), and to go beyond that limit would require another epansion box. it looked really cool, and the concept was completely unlike anything at the time.
but of course, it never got produced, though there was at least a prototype or models made (hence the photos in the design book). anybody out there that can back me up on this, or at least correct my highly fallible memory?
or, for that matter, a different aspect ratio, like a cinema display, or one of the other, wide format displays they sell...
hmm.. then maybe it would be worth watching a DVD movie on.
According to Steve Jobs the top 3 things we asked for were put into this new design. 1. Flat Panel screen 2. G4 processor 3. Superdrive (DVD burner on one of 3 models)
they forgot #4, and i think the loudest of the reactions to the old design: a 17'' screen.
they can very easily upgrade the new line with a 17'' option - and i think it will be the first thing they do when they revamp the line in a few months (along with dropping the price). look at it: just lengthen the swing arm a bit and put a larger display at the end of it; hell, it's almost something a user could do on his own...
i wonder how easy it would be for a user to swap out the monitor with a 17'' version of the flat screen...
or apple for that matter, to offer as a future edition - the new iMac SE...
shouldn't be too tough.. the swing arm looks like it could handle it.
oh well.. just a thought. now back to the webcast.
whatever. i'm a newton user, and i think it's an important feature. i use it all the time to record snippets of meetings, songs, ideas, etc.
the killer app for the newt was always its handwriting recognition, even when it didn't work, everything else was secondary to the interface and the HWR
people are falling all over themselves to make clear that apple doesn't have "iWalk" trademarked or whatnot.. maybe that's just the leaked name.
remember Apple still owns all the trademarks and copyrights to the Newton and the Newton OS.
though the new product (if it's indeed the real mccoy) likely has no roots at all in the venerable ol' Newt, it may still carry the name. who knows? stranger things have happened in cupertino...
no, but the newton did. it had (or has, if you still have one) a built-in microphone. and it had all of 4 megs (more or less, depending on whcih version you had)
voice recording is a major feature if you ask a newton user, and i'd be disappointed myself if there wasn't some way to do it in a new apple PDA
a built-in mic would be preferable if all you're doing is taking voice notes, but a real audio-in could capture music and anything else you can plug in, so that's an improvement (i guess)
godzilla ll day yesterday, and twilight zone all day today.
nothing else on, as far as i'm concerned.
it seems to me that headlines and press releases like this are simply Websidestory and Statmarket's way of getting their names in the news.
here's the ploy:
say something inflamatory (even if wildly inaccurate) about linux. get story picked up by web news services. get linux users up in arms. reap benefits of "even bad publicity is still publicity" reality.
slashdot is such a tool...
9ish this morning, a voice from the next office...
"hey [my name here]"
"yeah?"
"i got this weird attachment in my hotmail account. you think it's a virus?"
"maybe. do you know who it's from?"
"yeah"
"what's the file name?"
"gone dot ess see are."
".scr? a screensaver?"
"yeah. and the message is all weird. the grammar and spelling are really bad."
"screensavers are just executables anyway... and the grammar's bad? yeah. that's a worm"
"okay. i deleted it"
"i am so proud of you!"
finally, i'm gettting through to the people in my office. they know almost as well as i do how to spot a new worm on the prowl. shortly after she got rid of the first instance in her hotmail account, my mailbox started sprouting them like.. um.. mushrooms on cow pies. yeah.
melissa and all her bitches, and now sircam and the like have taught joe user his lesson (over and over, the lesson), so the more this kind of stuff happens, the better prepared we are.
i asked once a while ago - and nobody was able to answer - whether it was possible or feasible to route audio signals over an ethernet network. my goal was to be able to have ethernet speakers with a sound source plugged into the network as well.
my idea was spurred by the fact that my new office has ethernet in every room, but to get sound from the MP3 music server into those rooms, it would either require streaming the signal over the LAN (and each box would have its own buffer lag.. ugh) or else run speaker wire through all the rooms as well. why not use some portion of the ethernet standard to pump an audio signal through?
so, it looks like somebody did me one better, and made an ethernet-enabled guitar and amp.
so, when do i get to buy a receiver with 10/100 and a bunch of speakers with RJ45 jacks on them?
oh, i thought it said the NeXT interface. nevermind.
honestly, though, it would be really nice when some of the mainstream OSes adopt the option to use alternative file browsers, whether for the cutting edge geeks to see their files as quake maps, or for more specialized users to see things as they are more properly arranged, or, and this is where i think the research ought to be going, handicapped users being able to "see" their data in ways that are more appropriate for those without certain assumed abilities.
the real "next interface" will be here when there is an interface that a blind user can use to browse his hard drive as fast or faster than a sighted person can use the current stock of file browsers - instead of using some kludgy add-on or adaptive technology working with a file browser built for a sighted person.
Shin is looking for an actor whose voice resembles Lee's voice to read his lines; he says it's a relatively simple task to digitally doctor the voice to make it a near-exact replica of Lee's voice.
...
Shin also has a short list of Asian martial arts performers who have learned to imitate Lee's moves very closely. He plans to film them using motion capture equipment that he can then incorporate into his digital Bruce Lee models -- giving fight sequences a natural flow.
so.. he's going to have a Lee talkalike and a Lee fightalike, and potentially a Lee lookalike (for wide shots and such). so why not just use them, and traditional photography, instead of trying to resurrect Bruce Himself through technology? Hell, Brandon Lee did an admirable job in his shot at it.
the result would likely be a better homage to Lee, and less the necropheliac masturbation that has been the result of similar efforts thus far.
let the dead stay dead, dammit. especially the dead guys we liked when they were alive.
silly me, i thought the range for 802.11b was supposed to be 150 ft. you must live in a ridiculously tall house, or have a lot that's several acres in size to be complaining about range. the example i remember is that if you stick a base station in the middle of a (american) football field, you'd get a signal all the way to both goal lines.
now, if you have some kind of interference, then you're SOL. as for me, i've never had any problems with the range in my average-sized home, or in my average-sized back yard between my base station and my ibook, whereas my cordless phone breaks up walking out the back door.
what have these guys been smoking? oh yeah, here it is in the article:
"Peter Meyers, a professor of physics at Princeton University who was not part of the research team, said the finding is the "sort of crack" that "has been sought for many, many years."
that explains it all to me...
how utterly irresponsible and ridiculous that HeUnique insists that we "Grab it while you can."
:)
encouraging the slashdot community to go and download a piece of code that breaks a well-known and popular security methodology, quite possibly breaking the law in the process, simply because they can? how infantile and myopic.
oh, it's not that i object to the public breaking another MS Standard, or the ease with which the source is now distributed around the 'net.. i'm concerned for the poor schmuck who runs the webserver that is now so totally and irrevocably screwed by the slashdot effect.
please mirror
netbsd.
:)
it's as close as you're going to get.
i installed it on my lcII - it's nice to see the latest software version of something running on a 10 year-old low-end machine - and it's been good training on hacking on my OS X machine's BSD guts. i'd only been exposed to linux (well, and solaris and hp/ux at school) before.
hell, it even runs X (as in X windows) at 1 bit color on the tiny 12'' apple monitor perched on top.. it's wicked slow, but it's fun to see netscape and a couple of xterms compiling things (don't bother, it takes overnight for simple programs), the little LC Ethernet card (from welovemacs.com) going crazy, hard drive churning away... ahh
*that's* how computers are supposed to be built
Alpha is gone, PA-RISC is going, what's going to be left? MIPS? SPARC? AMD? Crusoe? "
*cough* PowerPC *cough*
IBM is still running quite hot with the power4, and motorola, though they have their heads up their asses, is assisting them with the next gen PowerPC.
yes, there's still MIPS and SPARC.. and even AMD (though they're essentially an x86 clone).. and what do they all have in common? they're not controlled by Intel, for one, but they're also all.. wait for it.. RISC
even the next gen intel chips are going risc-ish.
okay, no more martinis in the early afternoon for me...
I think you mean any other platform, except the Windows platform, right?
no. i mean any platform. my logic may be flawed, but it goes like this: i can play any game made for mac - ever (considering i can still play games made for OS 6.0.x, some of which need a mac plus emulator to run on a PPC), any game available via MAME, all the console emulators, and any title made for linux/unix as well (thanks virtualPC and darwin), and almost all the games ever made for DOS or Windows. sure, there are 3D games that are slow (but still play) and some recent titles i can't play in emulation, but those are almost all available in mac native form. so i add it up (of course, i have no actual numbers...) and come up with more games than you.
this is the point where i stick out my tongue and walk away.
i already have a portable playstation, and mine has better battery life. plus, it can play SNES, NES, gameboy, genesis, hundreds of arcade games, just about any PC game, and, oh yeah, any game they make for linux or Mac.
:) through the power of emulation, i have a completely portable machine that i can use to play more games than any other single platform.
it can emulate just about anything you throw at it, since it has a spiffy, wicked fast processor inside (not the fastest in the world, but it'll do in a pinch), and it has enough keys and buttons in the built-in controller to bind to even the most complicated of game controllers - plus USB to connect additional players if you like. the best part, though, apart from the ~5 hour battery life - and only a little less under heavy load, even spinning CDs, i've found - is the amazing thin, small, high-definition LCD screen. it's a thing of beauty. another perk is that it has the ability to play games over the internet, wirelessly, with 802.11 (though the manufacturer refers to it as "airport")
yep, it's an iBook.
a little heavier (but not much!), and more general-purpose than the portable PS1, but infinitely more useful
so take these stories about a portable this, a hacked up that, or a MAME the other, and stick them.. well, i don't care where you stick them.
certainly it's at a YDC and not at a federal, pound-you-in-the-ass penitentiary, but still, eight months.
that's a full year of school you'd have to miss, and take again with kids 2 years younger than you. and a year after _that_ you still wouldn't be able to leave the state or be out after curfew.
imagine you're back in high school, and remember the pain of persecution and social awkwardness of being a geek. add to that the weekly visits to your parole officer, and think that's not at least a little trying for a kid who, essentially, downloaded some software and ran it.
personally, i think it's light in comparison to the damage and loss of commerce in dollar amounts floating around from the "Attack" - and i hope his parole terms include not being able to use the Internet unsupervised - but considering the age of the of the offender with no priors (i presume) this isn't "ridiculously easy" or a wristslap. a wristslap would be a fine (which his parents have to pay) and maybe parole.
being confined to a cell, your movements and actions constantly under scrutiny for eight months, essentially without any liberties, is an appropriate sentence for someone who intentionally committed a severe act of vandalism. the travesty would be giving the same sentence, or less, to people who maim or kill while drunk behind the wheel of a car, which happens every day in the courts.
to quote:
dang. i couldn't find a good picture, but here's a place that sells them wholesale
i came across an elegantly intuitive, yet powerful, extensible UI the other day at the mall. yep, in the Discovery Channel Store, hanging on the rack with all the other knicknacks and doojobbies, there it was.
in essence, it's a PIM for kids in the form factor of a keychain about the size of a stick of gum.
on one end (left) was the keyring, and a small button inset into the front next to the LCD screen - 3 lines by about 24-30 characters.
the other end was a large button that, when twisted one way, functioned to scroll up, the other way to scroll down. when pressed, the button performed an action (enter)
with these three simple functions and the mode switching of the small button at the left, it accomplished every function of a PIM - including giving me my horoscope and telling my fortune. i learned how to use it within the thirty or so seconds i was playing with it before i was distracted by the 76-in-one multitool on the next shelf over.
my point? did i have one?
oh yeah. more than a few developers can take a lesson from a $5 keychain that got it right with just two buttons.