Nostalgia Nerd
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Vulcan Flipstart
🕑 Added 2024-08-29 01:45:11 +0000 UTCI feel like I might be emerging from a cloudy fog, to a clearer land where more videos can be made.
No promises, but I feel like a new era of videos is looming. Maybe, perhaps, hopefully.
Here's one, it's about the Vulcan Flipstart, an Ultra Mobile PC from 2007 that was pretty darn cool tbh.
Enjoy!
Much love.
Comments
Nostalgia Nerd
Oh dang. That's a super interesting titbit. Thank you!
Andrew Fraser
Had a Libretto and absolutely loved it 😊
GadgetBlues
I was the technical account manager at Microsoft for Vulcan, helping them make this happen. I actually handled a couple of top tier OEMs but got Vulcan as a side gig because of the Paul Allen connection. The original design using the Transmeta Crusoe (which I had helped Compaq ship in the TC-1000 convertible tablet in 2003) was completely final using Windows XP, and ready to go. Then Paul attended an event with Steve Ballmer who evangelized Windows Vista to him as the new all-singing, all-dancing solution. At the last possible minute, Paul told the (very demoralized) development team that they had to go back to the drawing board and re-engineer the entire machine using a Pentium M. Really, the Flipstart only existed because Paul wanted something like it, not because it would ever be a viable commercial product. He'd recruited excellent engineers but they soon realized that they would be at the whim of a billionaire. I ran into one of the engineers at a Seattle mechanical keyboard meetup in early 2020, he actually brought a couple of Flipstarts to the meetup. He'd managed to get Windows 7 running on one of them.
