Didn't quite keep it to 10 min but for me this is a short video heh. Couldnt resist a quick animated skit either. If anyone watching knows more about the Chat Pad please drop a line here!
I'd love to get my hands on that. I would carefully disassemble it, replace battery, capacitors, etc, restore it to new, find a way to get it working, and then auction it off for charity (women's and infants hospitals, which are still suffering after the whole covid thing). You are so lucky to have that, please take good care of it, and if you can restore it for charity, please do. Edit: Oh, I see, no motherboard, well I would install one to make it work.
It wasnt just intel making colored translucent Rounded/bubble/organic shaped prducts. That was the whole 2000 aesthetic. The futuristic, almost Alien vibe.
I worked in Intel team doing these products. We intentionally followed the blue translucent candy color thing that a lot of tech was doing at the time. Also the Intel logo was blue and that was another reason for that color. All of the actual industrial design was done by Ideo in San Francisco.
They got to the point of building a bunch of them that were nearly fully functional. Then they pulled the plug. I was the Intel UX designer for this thing.
@@TechTimeTraveller Intel did have other FCC IDs in the EJM-1231 range, for the wireless base station and the peripherals for it which were released. So maybe they applied for an FCC ID for the Chat Pad but never actually submitted it for FCC testing.
The one I have that boots has an FCC ID of EJM123117389; that is screen printed on the bottom. It also has a sticker saying it's an engineering sample. I looked up that ID on the FCC site and there was no close match but at least I could confirm it was an Intel ID.
My stab at decoding the mysterious button on the right is some sort of "switch panes" deal; I'm guessing emails would be presented in a split view - a list of messages on one side, the content of the currently selected message on the other - and pressing the button would switch the up/down keys from moving through the list of emails and scrolling the contents of the selected email.
I used a 14.4 version of that modem, It was a slick little unit. Many good hours of dial up Internet and BBS fun were had. I almost miss those days when the world of the Internet was new.
I am in an area with frontier DSL and it's 50-50 whether you happen to be in a neighborhood with good service or a neighborhood with bad service. Half the time I'm thinking I wish I had something to compare to but I swear dial-up was faster than this. Well they're finally bringing fiber through and we're finally getting an upgrade but meanwhile we're also getting a bypass to route traffic out of town and around and the construction crew has decided that they're going to continue to cut the lines I guess we can't have nice things. At least I am a semi-happy customer with Comcast for better or worse. But there was a time when I was at somebody's house working on their printer and it took an hour to download the driver update I was actually able to start in download it on my phone faster five years ago in the last five minutes of the download should've done that to begin with. Oh the dial up days living in the middle of nowhere in a valley. I can't say it was fast but it always connected at the same rate. 28.8
Another device like this one that missed the mark but on ther other side of the web period was the Sony Mylo comm. I had a sony Mylo Comm 2. what a cool device at the wrong time. A bit too modern for you but might be worth a lookup.
The Intel Chat Pad looks exactly like Apple egg shaped laptop eMacs and now the Apple Vision Pro, this makes so much sense where today’s technology is coming from, and when Steve Jobs described the iPhone3G with - internet - the phone - Mac all in in one is the same delivery tone to the Intel chat pad, internet, wireless, pc, isp. Etc. same tone!
I'm sure if this sold someone would turn these into desktop keyboards and have the display be for things like CPU usage and it could be a decent little keyboard for the pc
@@MegaManNeothe one I have is stickered “Beta 0 S/N 0080”. So likely at least 80 were built. But since they never really worked, I guess they mostly just stayed at Intel and ended up in employee’s junk boxes.
Really forward for Intel to make a chat device that enabled wireless connectivity to your pc over the internet that enabled connectivity from the chatpad to the internet to your ISP from the chatpad to the internet to your ISP from the chatpad to the PC to your ISP over the internet to the PC and over the internet from the chatpad to the internet to your ISP over the internet to the internet. You really only had a couple of devices like that and they all required a SIM card and a cell subscription contract.
That line had me thinking my computer crashed! it has a habit of hard crashing if I look at the USB-C cable going to my docking station followed with a hard crash with a haptic feedback on the trackpad stops and the screen freezes and the audio loops just like in the video over and over until the kernel panic watchdog kicks in. I'm getting so fed up with Apple.
8:16 I like the look of the transparent screen and basil thing but I can't help but think wow it makes the screen look small. In some ways if they just combined it to the keyboard and a flip down screen the same size it seems like it would've been a nicer design right now it looks like it's a little big to be like oh yeah I'm gonna drag that with me all around the house. Then again I'm using an iPhone mini which is still bigger than my iPhone 4s.
My own crackpot theory: It may have been a sort of mockup prototype? Something that is fit to take pictures of for media and press release, or pass around a room so people can get a feel for it, but not meant to be a functional prototype like an Engineering prototype.
These got to the point of being almost functional. I was the UX designer for this. For years I had one that would boot up but didn’t do anything since it couldn’t connect to anything.
Yeah pretty much. I was on the design team for this. Intel wanted to follow the design trend of the time to use transparent candy colors for tech products. I remember going to Fry's with a colleague and we bought like $2000 worth of random translucent tech gadgets on Intel's dime, for "evaluation".
If you have any interest in getting into electronic engineering even as a hobby, then using some dev boards and open source to make that functional probably won’t be as hard as you imagine and would be a perfect first project to start learning.
I mean I built a TV Typewriter and mostly understand how it works.. but that had plans and very good explanations of the workings of things. I'm not even sure where to start on figuring out the keyboard and display pinouts. But I'd be game to try.
I commented below before I got to this part A that’s what I was thinking it was a manufacturers prototype BUT that can be more valuable - it was to give to the plastic injection molders to duplicate and get their manufacturing site re-tooled ****++++ 11:05 Are you sure it’s a for demo functioning prototype or is it a manufacturing prototype which would mean it would have electronics inside but none of them would work it would just be mock ups to make the plastic case
Hard to say. My best guess is they might have been in a pilot run phase.. ran off a few cases that either were just there as static physical demos, or were to have boards added later. And then the whole program got canceled and they dumped them off.. maybe employees took whatever existed home. I'm hoping someone from Intel back in the day will see this and maybe have answers.
I worked on this product at Intel as the UX designer. These got to the engineering prototype level, the plastic tooling was probably final but no clue about the electronics. The one I have does boot up but all it does is complain that it can't find a base station.
You know i can totally see the use case of this because i used to do something very similar. I would remote desktop into my desktop PC from around the house on my eeePC netbook. This being before the days of cloud everything it was a much better experience than having 2 lots of out of sync data on your desktop and laptop. Plus, those old eeePC netbooks with their crappy atom CPUs, unless you were trying to watch like video or something it was way snappyer to just use remote desktop than use the netbook itself.
The use case was that you could be doing email and chat from this while someone else used the PC for other stuff. Made sense before smartphones and cheap laptops.
My thoughts are multiple different teams are working on this and the design team had the most free time, so they mocked up the casing so a higher up could confirm it was the right color blue. I worked at a company that made coffee makers we would often get something completely finished from one team while another was behind from other projects. By the time the hardware and software side of things caught up to the design team it was probably already too outdated to bring to market.
There was only one team for each aspect of this product. The industrial design was outsourced although Intel was involved in all stages of it, and Intel did the interaction design. These almost made it to production. This could have been a fully final production version of the case, long after colors finishes etc were approved. I was the UX designer for this.
That's insane that it's missing the logic board. Absolutely insane, why even remove it? Also, tells us more about the Cublazer modem! Looks pretty sweet. Is that for a Macintosh? 11:15 Probably not for USB charging, since that was very uncommon in 2001... And this doesn't use rechargeable batteries. Maybe an IR window or something?
I was the UX designer for this. The port was for an optional power adapter but it could also use non rechargeable AA batteries. It wasn’t supposed to need any cables. No IR either, it was RF only.
Hey, if the keyboard is amenable to have a membrane put below the keys (or other solution) and a replacement LCD/TFT/OLED panel exists just grab a Rock PI 5 (Yes, rock pi, way better than the Raspi 5 I have a NanoPC-T6 that uses the same soc so I definitely know hehe) and make a nice ARM laptop to insult Intel (unless you find a suitable Atom or similar SBC)
It was to switch focus between the two panes on the display. Such as inbox message list vs the current message. You could see both but only scroll one of them at a time. I was the UX designer for this.
Intel wanted to make deals with the large players at the time. I’m sure they talked to Microsoft and Yahoo. I know they had a deal with AOL since that was the only service it was going to support at initial release.
Or for people to play with at a conference. These dummy devices are incredibly common at those. You might have 1 that actually works and it's strapped down so it can't walk off, then you have a few more that people can pick up and play with, but you don't have to worry if they are stolen.
Interesting video. The reason it wasn't released was in 2000/2001 you could by a cheap Nokia cell phone that not only could SMS, but could do T9 Yahoo and AOL messaging too, and was stand alone, and small.
Thank you. I'm trying to remember when I got my first smartphone. It would have been an Ipaq I think, followed by a Jasjar, in the early 2000s. I did have basic messaging abilities on my Nokia as far back as the late 90s but it was painful not having a proper alphanumeric keypad. Had to hit each key multiple times to get the right letter. Ugh. I wish I could remember when I got the ipaq. People looked at me weird when I talked into my PDA and didn't understand why I'd want internet on such a small device. It was wifi internet only though.
@@TechTimeTraveller I think I got my Nokia cell phone early 2001. I had an IPAQ too, but I had the non cell version; I actually still have both of them, but the batteries after all this time are iffy lol.
@10p6 I went to power up my jasjar which I still have but it won't run without a battery, and the battery that was in there had blown up to half the size of the jasjar itself lol. Really would like to see whats left on there.
Intel didn’t kill it due to competition from phones, anyway at the time few if any phones did chat services like AIM or MSN. They killed it because they didn’t want to compete with PC OEMs and peripheral manufacturers. They liked creating tech that helped those companies create demand for PCs but they didn’t want to go so far as to compete with them.
I suppose you could make a pi work, but the goto embedded device for eg. a hand-wired keyboard or kb-matrix is an arduino. A bet I could figure out the KB if I had the oppertunity, but wouldn't know where start with the rest of it :p
I was the UX designer on the Intel team designing this. I have one. It boots but shows an error that it can't find the base station. The back has a sticker saying Beta 0 S/N 0080. There is also an engineering prototype sticker. FCC ID screen printed on the bottom is EJM123117389. They were functional (alpha or beta software) and started sample production but never made it to market, because Intel killed the wireless series family of products it was going to be a part of (the only ones that shipped besides the base station were a keyboard, mouse, and game controller). It was supposed to work with email & messaging from big services like AOL, MSN, Yahoo etc (but AOL was the only one that was under development). The industrial design and some UI design was done by Ideo in San Francisco. I think there were several reasons it was killed, it only would have launched with AOL and no guarantee that other services would be coming, also Intel started moving away from consumer tech products (they’d only gotten into them to help build the market to drive demand for PCs). Happy to answer any other questions but it was over 20 years ago!
Yay! Thank you. I was hoping someone with first hand knowledge would see this. I wonder if mine here ever had a board in it or was just a case that never got fully assembled? Do you know if these could do more than just email and chat? I'm curious what sort of chat service it used. Also if the PC software for it ever got to the public. Many thanks for your msg!
@@TechTimeTravellerThey were never intended to do more than email and chat and would have been compatible with only specific services such as MSN or AOL etc. - whoever Intel could make a deal with; the first version would have been AOL only. Nothing compatible with that cone shaped base station ever was sold to the public. Whatever was built Intel gave away to employees whether it was functional or not. My recollection is it mostly wasn’t fully functional.
These were intended only for email and messaging and only with big services like AOL, MSN, and Yahoo (AOL was the only one under development). I don’t think the PC software ever got released, I never even saw one of these working. I don’t know if your specific unit ever had a board in it - other than a design model which was solid plastic, the only ones I saw were like mine; functional prototypes.
@Sashazur Thank you for writing in on this. I suspected there were more of these out there. So the units that produced to that point were for internal use and testing then? They weren't going to be sold to the public? I wish I knew more about mine.. it seems to be missing 2 screws in the bottom so perhaps someone removed the board from it for whatever reason. I wonder if any schematics etc still exist for the screen, etc.. I'd love to make it functional somehow with another board. Really appreciate your comment!
I’m pretty sure you’re correct that the units that exist were never built to be sold, and were only intended for development and testing. But the only concrete evidence I have for that is the one I have says it’s an engineering sample, and the fact that there just don’t seem to be many of these floating around. I don’t know anything about where schematics could be found. The only documentation I have is the UI/UX specification which I wrote.
I had to get on my main account just to comment on this. I've been building a few handheld computers recently and that would be perfect for a cyberdeck, for lack of a better term at the moment. Making a few assumptions, you could probably squeeze a Raspberry Pi/Orange Pi/x64 Nuck style computer into it, power it from some thin li-ion cells, replace the display with a modern banner style wide display that's maybe 1280x400 (saving the original, of course), and the keyboard is most likely a matrix keyboard, wired up with columns and rows. The keyboard would be super easy to wire up to a Teensy or other similar microcontroller after some simple probing with a multimeter, and then modify a generic keyboards files to add in the special features. I recently did that for an Apple //c keyboard to use it in a portable terminal style machine for programming microcontrollers with a 1920x440 display. Just from what I could see, that Chat Pad shell has so much potential, without having to permanently modify the shell in case it is a proper prototype. Just from some assumptions, it looks like there's room and mounting points inside to mount a 3d printed bracket to to hold the guts nicely. Could probably even use that empty port for a barrel jack to charge it. For software you could go with any sort of Linux distro, or even do Win10 IoT and make it a dedicated messaging device like it was intended, but in a modern way with whatever messenger you like as the dedicated program running at boot. Which the latter could get you into the territory of trying to make your own interface for the program to make it match any sort of screen images you can find of it supposedly functioning. It's a rabbit hole that runs deep if you aren't careful, lol. Just a thought. Totally down to help out if you want to look into that at some point. I even have a 3d printer, since that's how I make the shells for my handheld computers among other things. I even do cad so making brackets for it wouldn't be too hard to do either.
Cool! but also a bummer the seller did not disclose there was no guts to this thing, I don't see how he could have not noticed it was an empty shell. Shame on the seller but what do you expect from eBay these days I guess. Anyway, cool video as always.
The one I have that does have guts, it’s not quite transparent enough to easily see inside or to make out what is in there. So it’s possible the seller didn’t know.
If this doesn't have a mainboard and the only other evidence of it's existence is basically photos and presentation, this is a display model, not a prototype. Really cool looking, would be nice to make a mock up using the shell in some non destructive way
@@Sashazur Why would someone remove the board of a prototype and sell it though? Even if prototypes exist surely selling a whole prototype is more lucrative than selling a shell and board separately just hoping two crazy people have broken prototypes that specifically need one of each of the separate components. It would be hard to convince me this wasn't only used for a photoshoot or something because I could think of no reason to remove the main board besides repairing a non working prototype, and if this one had a functional mainboard then why would someone disassemble a working prototype just to fix a broken one?
Normally I'd bet the LCD is one of the same standard chips everyone uses but this is Intel. If you can find a datasheet on the display driver that would be key. But that's all time you could spend doing other things. "I'm not an electronics engineer" shouldn't stop anyone from trying.
I think I got this for around $150 or so. It had one go around on ebay with an opening bid of $500 or something.. didn't get any takers, so the seller, to their credit, opened it at 99 cents the second time. There was only myself and one other bidder I think. Too obscure and I only found out about it myself when I saw the listing.
I used to have an iphone 3G pre-production unit, I think at one point it had an asset tag on it or something but it was lacking a serial number but no other identifying marks
Possible. Only reason I think they may have had a working unit is the newspaper photo I showed in the video.. that showed what looked like a BIOS POST screen, and was different from the screen shown in the color CES photo.
that silver and deep blue transparent plastic really is a look, though. so many electronics from this era were practically modern art pieces with their crazy organic forms and colors. it wasn't always very practical, but it sure does make for a cool artifact of another, perhaps more optimistic, time.
Hey, you could put a RasPi in there! Kidding. Sort-of. But there are people around (including me) who could help walk you through figuring out how to connect what's there. (Wondering if the LCD is real, though.)
@@TechTimeTraveller You know, thinking about the ARM processors in the PIs, ... That battery compartment would not have been big enough to power any of Intel's x86-based CPUs, especially the Pentium class, for very long -- definitely nothing powerful enough to do more than primitive pre-HTML markup. So, ... This would have been about the time Intel was developing and then abaondoning the XScale architecture ARM CPUs they developed from DEC's StrongARM stuff. So, when Intel got into the not-invented-here snit in the early 2000s and divested XScale, that might also have been part of the reason these products disappeared. It would have been pushing XScale a bit, too, performance-wise, but the HTML back then was also a little more primitive.
I was in electronics sales when these internet appliances started to come onto market, and I can tell you they arrived and they bombed out FAST. Moore's Law bit them pretty hard, I recall things like this appeared and disappeared within the space of 8 months or so, with smarter phones and "pocket PCs" taking over very quickly (things like the Compaq iPaq) for not all that much more. The FCC ID for this thing never even made it through submission... there's one for the base and one for the joystick though.
The FCC ID is what kind of had me wondering if this really was a prototype. I would have thought if this was a canceled production unit the ID would have been submitted. I thought pilot production unit.. but I'd assume they'd have a valid FCC ID since those could potentially be sold.
This thing is giving me an Apple Newton E-Mate vibe, for sure! It's funny, I worked for CompUSA back in that time period, and I do not recall any of these products! But then it was a busy time, and A LOT new an old companies seemed to coming up with stuff DAILY, so it was hard to keep up!
For sure.. there's so many things I've forgotten from that period of time. The only reason I remember the Intel cam is I took a heck of a lot of pictures with it when my kids were young.. before we could finally afford a real camera. :) Tech moves so fast and so many companies came up with these niche ideas during the early broadband internet era.
2:03 -> What in God's name were Intel think about this! I'm guessing they though it's vaguely like a steering wheel, We'll sell million to Gamers that are into driving games... sheez!
I was watching stargate sg-1 today and they had something that looked just like this in the episode… and there is no shortage of old computer stuff in that show.
I think the mystery button on the far right is likely a 'sync' button. Longer rectangle on the left representing the chat pad's internal display and the smaller right rectangle representing the PC, with an arrow going between the two. Kinda similar to other sync buttons I've seen. It should be no problem storing a fair number of text-only E-Mail messages inside it even with relatively cheap tech in 2001, which I'm guessing would be a large usage. Perhaps could also work as a 'pair' button or 'ready'/'available' button for realtime chat clients.
Nope it was to switch focus between the two panes on the display. The smaller pane was a list of items (such as inbox) and the larger one was the item you were currently viewing (such as an email message). I was the UX designer for this thing.
100% speculating, but its possible that it never had a motherboard, and the prototype just had a pigtail to wire the components to another device while they developed it.
Yes now that I have a complete unit courtesy of an Intel engineer here, I'm thinking mine never had a board and was just an engineering sample used for marketing or such. I'll be doing more of a deep dive with the complete unit next week.
This device, how it looks and how it interacts with hard and software screams early 2000's and I love it! I know I would have loved it, especially as laptops were still super expensive back in the day.
It reminds me of the AlphaSmart typing pads that I used in school as a kid, but wireless. I think This Does Not Compute did a video on them a year or two ago.
@@TechTimeTraveller I think Apple caused a lot of that with the egg shaped imac. Cause I remember seeing a lot of conceptual designs back then with the term "internet appliance" used a lot. A great example was when Gateway bought Amiga they drew up some designs for a new Amiga and it was pretty much like that, that bar of soap kind of shape. Remote controls had that problem for a while where they were tear drop shaped and could pop right out your hand like a bar of soap.
11:05 charging via USB… No charging via USB was not a thing especially when it only put out 300 mA. that's only a rather recent occurrence that USB is considered a power supply. What year was this again yeah that was probably a barrel jack if it was for charging or USB if it was for some sort of Communication to the whole system but then that doesn't make sense because they have the Wireless link. And well it is possible to have a battery compartment and removable cells most the stuff with removable cells expected to be using alkaline type cells. So this is truly a weird device.
@@TechTimeTravellerIt would have been released in 2001 if it hadn’t been cancelled. In the production version it was only supposed to have a power connector. You could run it on external power or non rechargeable AA batteries. But in the prototypes who knows?
But the big question here is what was the WIFI tech/standard? I checked on the Internets but no mention of it. No mention on the periferals boxes (ebay), nothing on the old Intel webpages. We have to assume it was proprietary not Bluetooth.
It was not Wifi, not Bluetooth. Maybe proprietary? The range was supposed to be about 150 feet under good conditions (based on the troubleshooting message mine shows when it boots up and can't find the base station).
That's a lovely looking device. I miss the colorful designs of 2000s tech. Shame there was no logic board inside, but thank you for showing off this little beauty.
I love how pre-frutiger all these look. You see the beginnings of the style but it's not quite there yet. It's in a weird in-between that looks like stuff a dentist office would have around that they got from some tooth care company because it's cheap to make round, bulbous plastic objects.
Didn't quite keep it to 10 min but for me this is a short video heh. Couldnt resist a quick animated skit either. If anyone watching knows more about the Chat Pad please drop a line here!
Honestly, 15 minutes is pretty good for retrotech vids I think
OMG THINK OF THE CHILDREN, WHAT WILL THE CHILDREN THINK??? A RETRO CHANNEL EXCEEDING THE 10 MINUTE TH-cam VIDEO LIMIT?!?!?!?!!!oneonequestionmark1?!
I'd love to get my hands on that. I would carefully disassemble it, replace battery, capacitors, etc, restore it to new, find a way to get it working, and then auction it off for charity (women's and infants hospitals, which are still suffering after the whole covid thing). You are so lucky to have that, please take good care of it, and if you can restore it for charity, please do.
Edit: Oh, I see, no motherboard, well I would install one to make it work.
The seller didn't mention that it's missing the entire logic board? Classic eBay.
dind't had batterys at hand so i sell it as untested.
@@Flofutzthen clearly state that you dont.
@@GINGER_KING_ I didn't sell it! just "for fun" citing the usual ebay phrases that should make you run away.
@@GINGER_KING_Yawn
The motherboard will mysteriously be listed a month later by the seller.
It wasnt just intel making colored translucent Rounded/bubble/organic shaped prducts. That was the whole 2000 aesthetic. The futuristic, almost Alien vibe.
Imagine how cool this look could be with some more modern materials
@@cloudycolacorpmight be cool to 3D print one.
Pretty sure it started with the iMac
I worked in Intel team doing these products. We intentionally followed the blue translucent candy color thing that a lot of tech was doing at the time. Also the Intel logo was blue and that was another reason for that color. All of the actual industrial design was done by Ideo in San Francisco.
Those CRT iMacs were the coolest thing in the world at the time.
The tooling for the case must have been very expensive. I think development was far along before the plug was pulled.
I'm thinking so too. I'm really hoping someone from Intel or associated in some way with this project sews this video and gives us some answers!
They got to the point of building a bunch of them that were nearly fully functional. Then they pulled the plug. I was the Intel UX designer for this thing.
If it was a prototype, it wouldn't have had an FCC ID.
It's not a valid ID though.. do they expire?
@@TechTimeTraveller Intel did have other FCC IDs in the EJM-1231 range, for the wireless base station and the peripherals for it which were released. So maybe they applied for an FCC ID for the Chat Pad but never actually submitted it for FCC testing.
The one I have that boots has an FCC ID of EJM123117389; that is screen printed on the bottom. It also has a sticker saying it's an engineering sample. I looked up that ID on the FCC site and there was no close match but at least I could confirm it was an Intel ID.
My stab at decoding the mysterious button on the right is some sort of "switch panes" deal; I'm guessing emails would be presented in a split view - a list of messages on one side, the content of the currently selected message on the other - and pressing the button would switch the up/down keys from moving through the list of emails and scrolling the contents of the selected email.
That’s exactly what it was. I was the UX designer for this thing.
I used a 14.4 version of that modem, It was a slick little unit. Many good hours of dial up Internet and BBS fun were had.
I almost miss those days when the world of the Internet was new.
I am in an area with frontier DSL and it's 50-50 whether you happen to be in a neighborhood with good service or a neighborhood with bad service. Half the time I'm thinking I wish I had something to compare to but I swear dial-up was faster than this.
Well they're finally bringing fiber through and we're finally getting an upgrade but meanwhile we're also getting a bypass to route traffic out of town and around and the construction crew has decided that they're going to continue to cut the lines I guess we can't have nice things.
At least I am a semi-happy customer with Comcast for better or worse. But there was a time when I was at somebody's house working on their printer and it took an hour to download the driver update I was actually able to start in download it on my phone faster five years ago in the last five minutes of the download should've done that to begin with.
Oh the dial up days living in the middle of nowhere in a valley. I can't say it was fast but it always connected at the same rate. 28.8
so when they decommissioned it they trashed mb and some garbage hunter snatched the shell.
open it up, is there any traces of the missing components?
Another device like this one that missed the mark but on ther other side of the web period was the Sony Mylo comm. I had a sony Mylo Comm 2. what a cool device at the wrong time. A bit too modern for you but might be worth a lookup.
The Intel Chat Pad looks exactly like Apple egg shaped laptop eMacs and now the Apple Vision Pro, this makes so much sense where today’s technology is coming from, and when Steve Jobs described the iPhone3G with - internet - the phone - Mac all in in one is the same delivery tone to the Intel chat pad, internet, wireless, pc, isp. Etc. same tone!
I'm sure if this sold someone would turn these into desktop keyboards and have the display be for things like CPU usage and it could be a decent little keyboard for the pc
If more of those were around, people would have probably already thrown Raspberries and micro controllers like the Pico or ESP32 at it.
@@MegaManNeothe one I have is stickered “Beta 0 S/N 0080”. So likely at least 80 were built. But since they never really worked, I guess they mostly just stayed at Intel and ended up in employee’s junk boxes.
Cool design for a cyberdeck! 🤔
Really forward for Intel to make a chat device that enabled wireless connectivity to your pc over the internet that enabled connectivity from the chatpad to the internet to your ISP from the chatpad to the internet to your ISP from the chatpad to the PC to your ISP over the internet to the PC and over the internet from the chatpad to the internet to your ISP over the internet to the internet. You really only had a couple of devices like that and they all required a SIM card and a cell subscription contract.
That line had me thinking my computer crashed! it has a habit of hard crashing if I look at the USB-C cable going to my docking station followed with a hard crash with a haptic feedback on the trackpad stops and the screen freezes and the audio loops just like in the video over and over until the kernel panic watchdog kicks in. I'm getting so fed up with Apple.
8:16 I like the look of the transparent screen and basil thing but I can't help but think wow it makes the screen look small. In some ways if they just combined it to the keyboard and a flip down screen the same size it seems like it would've been a nicer design right now it looks like it's a little big to be like oh yeah I'm gonna drag that with me all around the house. Then again I'm using an iPhone mini which is still bigger than my iPhone 4s.
I had that gamepad and the base!!
Cool. I love these early oddities. I have a 3Com Audrey, which did make it to market, but not for long.
My own crackpot theory: It may have been a sort of mockup prototype? Something that is fit to take pictures of for media and press release, or pass around a room so people can get a feel for it, but not meant to be a functional prototype like an Engineering prototype.
These got to the point of being almost functional. I was the UX designer for this. For years I had one that would boot up but didn’t do anything since it couldn’t connect to anything.
Were they trying to make it look like the iMac of the early 2000's?
Yeah pretty much. I was on the design team for this. Intel wanted to follow the design trend of the time to use transparent candy colors for tech products. I remember going to Fry's with a colleague and we bought like $2000 worth of random translucent tech gadgets on Intel's dime, for "evaluation".
Exactly
have a similar weird somewhere from Intel from around this era but more tablet form factor.
If you have any interest in getting into electronic engineering even as a hobby, then using some dev boards and open source to make that functional probably won’t be as hard as you imagine and would be a perfect first project to start learning.
I mean I built a TV Typewriter and mostly understand how it works.. but that had plans and very good explanations of the workings of things. I'm not even sure where to start on figuring out the keyboard and display pinouts. But I'd be game to try.
I commented below before I got to this part A that’s what I was thinking it was a manufacturers prototype BUT that can be more valuable - it was to give to the plastic injection molders to duplicate and get their manufacturing site re-tooled
****++++ 11:05
Are you sure it’s a for demo functioning prototype or is it a manufacturing prototype which would mean it would have electronics inside but none of them would work it would just be mock ups to make the plastic case
Hard to say. My best guess is they might have been in a pilot run phase.. ran off a few cases that either were just there as static physical demos, or were to have boards added later. And then the whole program got canceled and they dumped them off.. maybe employees took whatever existed home. I'm hoping someone from Intel back in the day will see this and maybe have answers.
@@TechTimeTraveller I think you’re absolutely right - it was a test run. Did it come in the retail packaging at all?
I worked on this product at Intel as the UX designer. These got to the engineering prototype level, the plastic tooling was probably final but no clue about the electronics. The one I have does boot up but all it does is complain that it can't find a base station.
@@WoodsPrecisionArmsI don’t think the development ever got far enough for retail packaging. I never saw any.
You know i can totally see the use case of this because i used to do something very similar. I would remote desktop into my desktop PC from around the house on my eeePC netbook. This being before the days of cloud everything it was a much better experience than having 2 lots of out of sync data on your desktop and laptop. Plus, those old eeePC netbooks with their crappy atom CPUs, unless you were trying to watch like video or something it was way snappyer to just use remote desktop than use the netbook itself.
The use case was that you could be doing email and chat from this while someone else used the PC for other stuff. Made sense before smartphones and cheap laptops.
My thoughts are multiple different teams are working on this and the design team had the most free time, so they mocked up the casing so a higher up could confirm it was the right color blue. I worked at a company that made coffee makers we would often get something completely finished from one team while another was behind from other projects. By the time the hardware and software side of things caught up to the design team it was probably already too outdated to bring to market.
There was only one team for each aspect of this product. The industrial design was outsourced although Intel was involved in all stages of it, and Intel did the interaction design. These almost made it to production. This could have been a fully final production version of the case, long after colors finishes etc were approved. I was the UX designer for this.
@Sashazur Nice you folks did good work it looks great 👍
Sounds like a competitor for General Magic!
This is peak 2000’s plastic
That's insane that it's missing the logic board. Absolutely insane, why even remove it?
Also, tells us more about the Cublazer modem! Looks pretty sweet. Is that for a Macintosh?
11:15 Probably not for USB charging, since that was very uncommon in 2001... And this doesn't use rechargeable batteries. Maybe an IR window or something?
I was the UX designer for this. The port was for an optional power adapter but it could also use non rechargeable AA batteries. It wasn’t supposed to need any cables. No IR either, it was RF only.
Hey, if the keyboard is amenable to have a membrane put below the keys (or other solution) and a replacement LCD/TFT/OLED panel exists just grab a Rock PI 5 (Yes, rock pi, way better than the Raspi 5 I have a NanoPC-T6 that uses the same soc so I definitely know hehe) and make a nice ARM laptop to insult Intel (unless you find a suitable Atom or similar SBC)
The far right button is probably for send/receive?
Oooh.. that's a good guess. The button itself is a bit ambiguous to me but that could be it.
I've seen a bunch of early 90s TVs use this very symbol for automatic channel search (as in "tuning")
It was to switch focus between the two panes on the display. Such as inbox message list vs the current message. You could see both but only scroll one of them at a time. I was the UX designer for this.
@@Sashazur ah ic. That makes sense. :)
I would prefer a "shit posting pad"
Lol.. in brown instead of blue
Would have been cool if it worked with MSN messenger
Intel wanted to make deals with the large players at the time. I’m sure they talked to Microsoft and Yahoo. I know they had a deal with AOL since that was the only service it was going to support at initial release.
0:51 -> Very IMac'ish
There will be possible no serial no. because of the missing Mainboard. This is a dummy device just for the showcase.
The one I have that boots has a sticker that says Beta 0 Serial no. 0080.
Zamzam water
1 day ago!!!
Mod!
Bet the ebay seller took it out and is selling it as a separate part =_=
8:00 It's clearly just an IMac rip-off. Colored rounded clear plastic...
The banner for patron at beginning was distracting
\
🎵🎶"From the chatpad to the PC to your ISP"🎶🎵
I bet someone could remix that bit into a proper banger
Chatpad to the ISP to the PC.
Needs like a Steve Ballmer beat box.
There are many levels of prototyping. Could of been the prototype to show off to the marketing team.
Or for people to play with at a conference. These dummy devices are incredibly common at those. You might have 1 that actually works and it's strapped down so it can't walk off, then you have a few more that people can pick up and play with, but you don't have to worry if they are stolen.
Interesting video. The reason it wasn't released was in 2000/2001 you could by a cheap Nokia cell phone that not only could SMS, but could do T9 Yahoo and AOL messaging too, and was stand alone, and small.
Thank you. I'm trying to remember when I got my first smartphone. It would have been an Ipaq I think, followed by a Jasjar, in the early 2000s. I did have basic messaging abilities on my Nokia as far back as the late 90s but it was painful not having a proper alphanumeric keypad. Had to hit each key multiple times to get the right letter. Ugh. I wish I could remember when I got the ipaq. People looked at me weird when I talked into my PDA and didn't understand why I'd want internet on such a small device. It was wifi internet only though.
@@TechTimeTraveller I think I got my Nokia cell phone early 2001. I had an IPAQ too, but I had the non cell version; I actually still have both of them, but the batteries after all this time are iffy lol.
@10p6 I went to power up my jasjar which I still have but it won't run without a battery, and the battery that was in there had blown up to half the size of the jasjar itself lol. Really would like to see whats left on there.
Intel didn’t kill it due to competition from phones, anyway at the time few if any phones did chat services like AIM or MSN. They killed it because they didn’t want to compete with PC OEMs and peripheral manufacturers. They liked creating tech that helped those companies create demand for PCs but they didn’t want to go so far as to compete with them.
I bet it would be amazing with a little Pi Zero 2 W, and someone that could find out how to link that keyboard, buttons, and this screen. Great vid.
I suppose you could make a pi work, but the goto embedded device for eg. a hand-wired keyboard or kb-matrix is an arduino. A bet I could figure out the KB if I had the oppertunity, but wouldn't know where start with the rest of it :p
I was the UX designer on the Intel team designing this. I have one. It boots but shows an error that it can't find the base station. The back has a sticker saying Beta 0 S/N 0080. There is also an engineering prototype sticker. FCC ID screen printed on the bottom is EJM123117389. They were functional (alpha or beta software) and started sample production but never made it to market, because Intel killed the wireless series family of products it was going to be a part of (the only ones that shipped besides the base station were a keyboard, mouse, and game controller). It was supposed to work with email & messaging from big services like AOL, MSN, Yahoo etc (but AOL was the only one that was under development). The industrial design and some UI design was done by Ideo in San Francisco. I think there were several reasons it was killed, it only would have launched with AOL and no guarantee that other services would be coming, also Intel started moving away from consumer tech products (they’d only gotten into them to help build the market to drive demand for PCs). Happy to answer any other questions but it was over 20 years ago!
Yay! Thank you. I was hoping someone with first hand knowledge would see this. I wonder if mine here ever had a board in it or was just a case that never got fully assembled? Do you know if these could do more than just email and chat? I'm curious what sort of chat service it used. Also if the PC software for it ever got to the public. Many thanks for your msg!
@@TechTimeTravellerThey were never intended to do more than email and chat and would have been compatible with only specific services such as MSN or AOL etc. - whoever Intel could make a deal with; the first version would have been AOL only. Nothing compatible with that cone shaped base station ever was sold to the public. Whatever was built Intel gave away to employees whether it was functional or not. My recollection is it mostly wasn’t fully functional.
These were intended only for email and messaging and only with big services like AOL, MSN, and Yahoo (AOL was the only one under development). I don’t think the PC software ever got released, I never even saw one of these working. I don’t know if your specific unit ever had a board in it - other than a design model which was solid plastic, the only ones I saw were like mine; functional prototypes.
@Sashazur Thank you for writing in on this. I suspected there were more of these out there. So the units that produced to that point were for internal use and testing then? They weren't going to be sold to the public? I wish I knew more about mine.. it seems to be missing 2 screws in the bottom so perhaps someone removed the board from it for whatever reason. I wonder if any schematics etc still exist for the screen, etc.. I'd love to make it functional somehow with another board. Really appreciate your comment!
I’m pretty sure you’re correct that the units that exist were never built to be sold, and were only intended for development and testing. But the only concrete evidence I have for that is the one I have says it’s an engineering sample, and the fact that there just don’t seem to be many of these floating around. I don’t know anything about where schematics could be found. The only documentation I have is the UI/UX specification which I wrote.
I had to get on my main account just to comment on this. I've been building a few handheld computers recently and that would be perfect for a cyberdeck, for lack of a better term at the moment. Making a few assumptions, you could probably squeeze a Raspberry Pi/Orange Pi/x64 Nuck style computer into it, power it from some thin li-ion cells, replace the display with a modern banner style wide display that's maybe 1280x400 (saving the original, of course), and the keyboard is most likely a matrix keyboard, wired up with columns and rows. The keyboard would be super easy to wire up to a Teensy or other similar microcontroller after some simple probing with a multimeter, and then modify a generic keyboards files to add in the special features. I recently did that for an Apple //c keyboard to use it in a portable terminal style machine for programming microcontrollers with a 1920x440 display.
Just from what I could see, that Chat Pad shell has so much potential, without having to permanently modify the shell in case it is a proper prototype. Just from some assumptions, it looks like there's room and mounting points inside to mount a 3d printed bracket to to hold the guts nicely. Could probably even use that empty port for a barrel jack to charge it. For software you could go with any sort of Linux distro, or even do Win10 IoT and make it a dedicated messaging device like it was intended, but in a modern way with whatever messenger you like as the dedicated program running at boot. Which the latter could get you into the territory of trying to make your own interface for the program to make it match any sort of screen images you can find of it supposedly functioning. It's a rabbit hole that runs deep if you aren't careful, lol.
Just a thought. Totally down to help out if you want to look into that at some point. I even have a 3d printer, since that's how I make the shells for my handheld computers among other things. I even do cad so making brackets for it wouldn't be too hard to do either.
Cool! but also a bummer the seller did not disclose there was no guts to this thing, I don't see how he could have not noticed it was an empty shell. Shame on the seller but what do you expect from eBay these days I guess. Anyway, cool video as always.
The one I have that does have guts, it’s not quite transparent enough to easily see inside or to make out what is in there. So it’s possible the seller didn’t know.
This reminds me of the Intel microscope I've got...
LGR just did a video on that camera :)
Yep. Bit of a trip down memory lane with that one. I don't know what happened to ours. I guess we tossed it.
My very first thought, too... 😂
Good for LGR.
@MachtNixPasstSo you and @pikadroo sound fun at parties!
@@thenotoriouspieif i cared what lgr hard to say about anything i’d be over there watching him.
If this doesn't have a mainboard and the only other evidence of it's existence is basically photos and presentation, this is a display model, not a prototype.
Really cool looking, would be nice to make a mock up using the shell in some non destructive way
There were prototypes. I have one that boots up.. I was the UX designer for this product.
@@Sashazur Why would someone remove the board of a prototype and sell it though? Even if prototypes exist surely selling a whole prototype is more lucrative than selling a shell and board separately just hoping two crazy people have broken prototypes that specifically need one of each of the separate components.
It would be hard to convince me this wasn't only used for a photoshoot or something because I could think of no reason to remove the main board besides repairing a non working prototype, and if this one had a functional mainboard then why would someone disassemble a working prototype just to fix a broken one?
I hope you got a partial refund.
8:55 this button was meant for moving between the message list and the body of the message. That is why it has a divider with a 2-way arrow over it.
Correct. I did UX design for this.
I remember really enjoying the Intel USB microscope from this product line as a kid.
Normally I'd bet the LCD is one of the same standard chips everyone uses but this is Intel. If you can find a datasheet on the display driver that would be key. But that's all time you could spend doing other things. "I'm not an electronics engineer" shouldn't stop anyone from trying.
that looped sample was amazing!
Lemme use it please I’ll program it
How much is " not too much money"?
Best wishes.
I think I got this for around $150 or so. It had one go around on ebay with an opening bid of $500 or something.. didn't get any takers, so the seller, to their credit, opened it at 99 cents the second time. There was only myself and one other bidder I think. Too obscure and I only found out about it myself when I saw the listing.
I used to have an iphone 3G pre-production unit, I think at one point it had an asset tag on it or something but it was lacking a serial number but no other identifying marks
I'm wondering if they were just prototyping the housing.
Possible. Only reason I think they may have had a working unit is the newspaper photo I showed in the video.. that showed what looked like a BIOS POST screen, and was different from the screen shown in the color CES photo.
I had one that booted up but didn’t do more than that without any base station or software. I was the Intel UX designer for this product.
that silver and deep blue transparent plastic really is a look, though. so many electronics from this era were practically modern art pieces with their crazy organic forms and colors. it wasn't always very practical, but it sure does make for a cool artifact of another, perhaps more optimistic, time.
lgr did a video on that intel digital camera
Hey, you could put a RasPi in there!
Kidding. Sort-of.
But there are people around (including me) who could help walk you through figuring out how to connect what's there.
(Wondering if the LCD is real, though.)
It looks to be pretty real. I should open this thing up and see what exists in the way of cabling.
@@TechTimeTraveller You know, thinking about the ARM processors in the PIs, ...
That battery compartment would not have been big enough to power any of Intel's x86-based CPUs, especially the Pentium class, for very long -- definitely nothing powerful enough to do more than primitive pre-HTML markup. So, ...
This would have been about the time Intel was developing and then abaondoning the XScale architecture ARM CPUs they developed from DEC's StrongARM stuff. So, when Intel got into the not-invented-here snit in the early 2000s and divested XScale, that might also have been part of the reason these products disappeared.
It would have been pushing XScale a bit, too, performance-wise, but the HTML back then was also a little more primitive.
“Over the internet to the internet.” 😂😂
I was in electronics sales when these internet appliances started to come onto market, and I can tell you they arrived and they bombed out FAST. Moore's Law bit them pretty hard, I recall things like this appeared and disappeared within the space of 8 months or so, with smarter phones and "pocket PCs" taking over very quickly (things like the Compaq iPaq) for not all that much more.
The FCC ID for this thing never even made it through submission... there's one for the base and one for the joystick though.
The FCC ID is what kind of had me wondering if this really was a prototype. I would have thought if this was a canceled production unit the ID would have been submitted. I thought pilot production unit.. but I'd assume they'd have a valid FCC ID since those could potentially be sold.
@@TechTimeTraveller Could be a molding/assembly line test, it should be easy to discern whether or not a motherboard was ever actually fitted.
tl dr
The one I have that is bootable has a screen printed FCC ID on the bottom but also has an "engineering sample" sticker.
I have a mother board for it, my father worked for them a while ago and has a bunch of extra stuff by intel including a old mother board for it
And replacement lcds for it
Oh, I'm super jelly. I love anything intel from this era.
From the Chat Pad to the PC to your ISP over the Internet to the Internet.
sounds like a great project for sticking a pi zero w into
Looks like it's about to give birth to a litter of Sega Genesis controllers
Wonder if it would be worth taking measurements and building something around a rp2040 to make it do what it was always meant to?
This thing is giving me an Apple Newton E-Mate vibe, for sure! It's funny, I worked for CompUSA back in that time period, and I do not recall any of these products! But then it was a busy time, and A LOT new an old companies seemed to coming up with stuff DAILY, so it was hard to keep up!
For sure.. there's so many things I've forgotten from that period of time. The only reason I remember the Intel cam is I took a heck of a lot of pictures with it when my kids were young.. before we could finally afford a real camera. :) Tech moves so fast and so many companies came up with these niche ideas during the early broadband internet era.
00's tech really liked its round transparent designs
Get Foone Turing to look at it lol. Making weird keyboards is their thing!
sony play station made that just now.
Fascinating.
Get an ardweeno and finish it.
if it is a proto, cool... umm well you got lucky you have a mostly finished thing... give it a beating heart!
2:03 -> What in God's name were Intel think about this! I'm guessing they though it's vaguely like a steering wheel, We'll sell million to Gamers that are into driving games... sheez!
USB 1.1 was likely the driving force for Intel to show what was possible with a new PC that was Y2K compliant 😅
I was watching stargate sg-1 today and they had something that looked just like this in the episode… and there is no shortage of old computer stuff in that show.
You might be able to put a Raspberry PI in there and get some sort of functionality from it.
I think the mystery button on the far right is likely a 'sync' button. Longer rectangle on the left representing the chat pad's internal display and the smaller right rectangle representing the PC, with an arrow going between the two. Kinda similar to other sync buttons I've seen. It should be no problem storing a fair number of text-only E-Mail messages inside it even with relatively cheap tech in 2001, which I'm guessing would be a large usage. Perhaps could also work as a 'pair' button or 'ready'/'available' button for realtime chat clients.
Nope it was to switch focus between the two panes on the display. The smaller pane was a list of items (such as inbox) and the larger one was the item you were currently viewing (such as an email message). I was the UX designer for this thing.
@@Sashazur Oh, neat. Interesting way to go about navigation.
Store display model, perhaps?
I am like number 597
wot no power ???
Run a esp32 in it
Hah! ThiefBay.
100% speculating, but its possible that it never had a motherboard, and the prototype just had a pigtail to wire the components to another device while they developed it.
Yes now that I have a complete unit courtesy of an Intel engineer here, I'm thinking mine never had a board and was just an engineering sample used for marketing or such. I'll be doing more of a deep dive with the complete unit next week.
LGR just did a video on the digital camera!
Yep. Just watched it today! Memories. :)
This device, how it looks and how it interacts with hard and software screams early 2000's and I love it!
I know I would have loved it, especially as laptops were still super expensive back in the day.
It reminds me of the AlphaSmart typing pads that I used in school as a kid, but wireless. I think This Does Not Compute did a video on them a year or two ago.
Dig the sunday morning video at any length. It’s bigger than i thought from the picture you posted.
Yeah I thought it was going to be tiny myself.. but. Yeah. Intel was doing what Chrysler did with fins in the late 50s. :)
@@TechTimeTraveller I think Apple caused a lot of that with the egg shaped imac. Cause I remember seeing a lot of conceptual designs back then with the term "internet appliance" used a lot. A great example was when Gateway bought Amiga they drew up some designs for a new Amiga and it was pretty much like that, that bar of soap kind of shape. Remote controls had that problem for a while where they were tear drop shaped and could pop right out your hand like a bar of soap.
11:05 charging via USB… No charging via USB was not a thing especially when it only put out 300 mA. that's only a rather recent occurrence that USB is considered a power supply. What year was this again yeah that was probably a barrel jack if it was for charging or USB if it was for some sort of Communication to the whole system but then that doesn't make sense because they have the Wireless link. And well it is possible to have a battery compartment and removable cells most the stuff with removable cells expected to be using alkaline type cells. So this is truly a weird device.
Good call. I am receiving a complete unit next week sometime and it sounds like it IS a USB port but for syncing/updating the device.. not charging.
@@TechTimeTravellerIt would have been released in 2001 if it hadn’t been cancelled. In the production version it was only supposed to have a power connector. You could run it on external power or non rechargeable AA batteries. But in the prototypes who knows?
But the big question here is what was the WIFI tech/standard? I checked on the Internets but no mention of it. No mention on the periferals boxes (ebay), nothing on the old Intel webpages. We have to assume it was proprietary not Bluetooth.
It was not Wifi, not Bluetooth. Maybe proprietary? The range was supposed to be about 150 feet under good conditions (based on the troubleshooting message mine shows when it boots up and can't find the base station).
@Sashazur So a proprietary wireless protocol hum?... Look at them no fear of writing code lol
That's a lovely looking device. I miss the colorful designs of 2000s tech. Shame there was no logic board inside, but thank you for showing off this little beauty.
Very cool :) I love intel prototypes, used to work in a lab where we where given them to test and code for, though I have never seen that one !
woohoo! Been hoping for this since I saw the thread!
Reminds me of the Intel dot station
So its a motorola IMFree message pad, sort of....
The shape is very cool.
Why is it shaped like a sanitary pad?
I love how pre-frutiger all these look. You see the beginnings of the style but it's not quite there yet. It's in a weird in-between that looks like stuff a dentist office would have around that they got from some tooth care company because it's cheap to make round, bulbous plastic objects.
Oh boy 🌈🥺