Mac Mini

[Tony Duell]

> Yep, personally I'd only buy a Mac mini if it was 10-20% bigger and came with 
> some real ports - say serial, parallel, and SCSI. Then it'd be a nice compact 

THis reminds me of something that I've been looking for : 

A reasonably portable computer -- meaning it can be mains powered, but 
must be all one box (including keyboard and display), although I suppose 
I would accepta machine that needs a serial terminal (although not a 
PC-like machine that needs a monitor and keyboard)

It needs to have some kind of local storage (either floppy disks or 
battery-backed RAM), and some way of transferring data to my linux box 
(floppies, or a serial port and e.g. kermit). And I want to be able to 
probram it in something above machine code (BASIC, Forth, a 
calculator-like keystroke language)

Now for the problem. I want user ports, and lots of them. Plenty of 
digital I/O lines. An ADC would be nice too. And of course I want real 
documentation.

Machines that come close are the HP71B (but the user ports are the 82165 
modules, which need their own PSU) and the BBC Micro (but it's far too 
many boxes, machine, monitor, disk drive, etc).

> well-designed machine with some useful connectivity too. It seems that no 
> matter what the USB-advocates say, bodging that sort of stuff on top of 
> Universal Screwed-up Bus plain doesn't work...

I prefer 'Useless Serial Botch', on the grounds it's not universal, and 
it's not a bus.

I saw another useless USB product today -- the USB Hamster Wheel. It was 
a little motorised treadmill wheel with a toy hamster in it, apparently 
it plugs into a USB port, you run the supplied Lusedoze drives, and it 
spins round when you typr. Hmmm....

-tony