Radio Shack asked $3,495 in 1983 for a 12-megabyte external Winchester meant to sit beside a TRS-80 Model II, Model 12, or Model 16. That price lands near $11,754 in 2026 money. Clint Basinger of LGR pulled one of those units from long-term storage, cracked the case, and gave it a brief power-on test before packing the vintage hard drive off to a museum.
Storage still coughs up late-90s leftovers for Clint Basinger of LGR, and the latest one is a molded kitchen that sits on a PC keyboard and pretends to bake. Easy-Bake Kitchen, sold by Hasbro Interactive in fall 1999 for about $40, arrived as a CD-ROM plus a strap-on playset aimed at ages three and up. Box copy promised to turn a Windows 95 or 98 machine into a kitchen full of fun with no waiting and no mess. LGR found his copy years after a viewer named Ryan Kitty mailed it in, then pulled it back out after a hurricane soaked the downstairs collection room in what he calls storm juice. A scrub later, the plastic was ready for another shift.
Shing Solutions already had a name for a gutted M4 Mac Mini. Once the retail shell came off and the board sat in a printed sleeve with Apple’s original heatsink and blower still bolted on, that package became the Mac Nano. The new project puts that sleeve inside a second body, a handheld deck that treats the whole computer like a giant Game Boy cartridge you can pull and replace.
Pamir AI built Lapis One so an agent can stop borrowing the family laptop. This finished 85 by 85 by 28 millimeter computer weighs 227 grams and looks closer to a small consumer gadget than a development board you still have to case. Painted white aluminum or anodized black aluminum wraps a plastic top shell. A Sharp 240 by 400 monochrome memory LCD sits on the face, the same low-power panel family used in Panic’s Playdate, so status lines and task notes can stay visible all day without chewing through the 3,300 mAh battery.
Photo credit: The DIY Life
You can close the lid, grab the handle, and walk away with Wikipedia, street maps, a media library, and a local language model riding in one printed case. That is the brief Michael Klements set for himself when he wrapped Crosstalk Solutions’ free Project Nomad stack in a 3D-printed rack that behaves like a travel workstation. Nearby phones, tablets, and laptops join a private network and open a normal browser. Pages load from the box in the case, not from a tower somewhere else.
Lenovo rolled Project AeroBlade onto the IFA Berlin floor this week as a ThinkBook-class concept that treats cooling as the last piece of bulk still worth removing. Shown at Innovation World on September 3, the 14-inch machine stays under 10 millimeters thick and under 830 grams, a magnesium-aluminum shell with a high screen-to-body OLED panel, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 7. Official copy frames it as full-performance computing for hybrid work, with every part of the board and chassis sized around travel rather than a traditional heat stack.
Gavin Free of the Slow Mo Guys bought the LaCie 12big Thunderbolt 3 in 2019 because twelve 14TB 7200-rpm enterprise drives packed 168 terabytes into one desktop tower and Thunderbolt 3 could shove footage across at up to 2600 megabytes per second. That kind of space and speed made sense for years of high-frame-rate video. Seven years later the tower simply would not stay on. Fans sat still. After about ten seconds the whole unit powered itself down. Warranty had expired, the model had been discontinued, and Seagate’s answer was to buy a new one.
Forum regulars who had sold and played the GP32 and GP2X decided those machines left too much on the table, so Craig Rothwell, Fatih Kilic, Michael Mrozek (known as EvilDragon), and Michael Weston started sketching a successor, called Pandora, that mixed a proper Linux desktop with real game controls. Dave Cancilier shaped the clamshell case and keymat.
Sinclair shipped the ZX81 in 1981 with a Z80, an 8K ROM, and one kilobyte of static RAM. After the screen buffer and system variables took their share, a BASIC listing had only a few hundred bytes left to stand in. A black plastic box that slid onto the rear edge connector promised sixteen times that space. For a lot of first-time owners, that pack was the line between a curiosity and a machine you could actually write on.
