Mac Mini

[Jos Dreesen]

Am zaterdag, 03.12.05, um 00:49 Uhr (Europe/Zurich) schrieb 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

I use a portable DOLCH 386 for that : Lunchbox design with keyboard and 
plasma display.
Fits a standard PC motherboard, mine now has a 133 MHz Pentium inside.
It is stocked with Eprom programmer , BMC 20 analog/digital IO card, 
SCSI card , Ethernet, parallel port and dual RS232.
It does not (yet) have USB.
IDE and floppy interfaces are brought out, for those few occasions I 
still need a 5 1/4 Floppy.
Best of all, these Dolch are very cheap on ebay.

Main problems are : limited to the supplied ISA VGA card, haven't yet 
figured out how to use a PCI card for that
Also limited to monochrome 640x480, because of the Plasma display.

If you look upon the motherboard as a replaceable part, just like the 
CPU itself, it should fit Tony's requirements.
( and it does read PDF's, although at standard  VGA it is not a 
pleasure. )

							Jos