Open Lexmark Productivity Studio Won’T Open?

Oh man, this is such a throwback for me. Lol. My stepdad was 1 of the dozen or so people who bought 1 of these things. He bought this (our’s was an odd green color) and a pda for my mom for an anniversary gift. I remember me and my sisters thinking it was a kinda crappy anniversary gift, but I’ll be damned if my mom didn’t do almost everything with it and go everywhere with that pda. She thought she was too cool back then. Lol.

Wow! Okay so former 3Com engineer here who worked in Santa Clara from 1999 until 2002. A couple of things. First of all, did you know Oprah gave one to every audience member on her “Oprah’s favorite things” episode?? Also I’m surprised you mentioned Kerbango. It was a great idea, but sounded like a clock radio!! I did tech support for their enterprise products (server NIC cards, switches.. that sort of thing) we should have stuck with that! Believe it or not, as early as 2000 we had Cardbus and PCI Wi-Fi products! We had a new CEO, who wanted the consumer market though….. we had no chance. Just because we bought USRobitxs (mainly for the Modem IP) and got Palm in the deal…. He thought that could mean we’d succeed in any consumer market. He was dead wrong!!!!!

Another interesting internet appliance from the late ’90s would be the i-opener. I remember being in college when it came out and a bunch of people were buying It’s super cheap because It was supposed to be useless without signing up for a specific internet provider. Instead they just hacked the thing and put Linux on it. The “just put Linux on it” meme started very very early.

I used to work for AT&T WorldNet Service (for one of their CS vendors) on their knowledge base team and was the guy responsible for putting together the help content for the customer support agents for the 3Com Audrey in time for its launch. The package that I had received from the client management team was just a large PDF file with screenshots, basic info, and a huge flowchart showing how the features worked and I had a week to get it published. Four days in and I got it all ready to go. I felt awesome! However, the next day, Friday, I was informed that AT&T WorldNet Service decided to drop the 3Com Audrey. So…yeah.

Nice article. I was right there in the middle of all the Internet craziness of the late 90’s and early 2000’s and knew these “appliances” would never make it big. They were too close in price to a low end PC and just did not have the features people wanted. 3COM made some really dumb choices back in the day and went from a trusted mid range brand to a joke in just a few years. They could have been here now competing with TP-Link and Netgear if they had just stuck to what they were good at.

I remember the late 90s / early 2000s being a very exciting time for devices like this. It seemed like every company was looking for any way they could to get new users online. Sadly most devices like this ultimately failed or found a very niche audience. Thank you for the article on this one. I remember reading a little bit about it and it’s failure but didn’t know much beyond that.

I thought I dreamt these up, nicely done! Thank you for the review. A lot of what Audrey offered was ironically ahead of its time; I’m sure they picked up a lot of cues from Mac, but I was shocked as soon as you opened the box: the styling of the instructions and “What’s inside” sheet, (chef’s kiss). And that clear stylus and sorta-retro/sorta-future set-up?? Way cool in my book.

Ahh the memories. I bought one if these for probably $50 in early 2002 and used it to make a touch screen remote control system as a senior project. Had an ir-blaster controlled out from the serial port. Thanks to the QNX OS I was able to fairly easily write my own software to run on it. If my memory serves I did not need a special USB ethernet dongle and I used a cheap generic one, but that could have been because I wasn’t running the Audrey software but just the core OS and my own software. It was a pretty neat project, and I had the coolest home entertainment system control panel next to my couch.

I was working at Circuit City during this time, remember these well. I actually bought myself an i-Opener net-appliance, because I had heard about folks hacking them. Ended up upgrading the RAM (to 64MB iirc) and CPU (180mhz IDT WinChip to a 200mhz Pentium MMX), and added a 3.2GB hard drive, ran Windows 98 on it, put it in my moms kitchen for her to look up recipes and stuff. I might still have it packed away in a box somewhere.

I was always intrigued by these internet appliances I kept reading about at the start of the 2000s. People looking at the growth of the Internet and trying to figure out what would stick. I do wonder if this would have had a better opportunity if it had been released as a terminal for something like France’s Minitel?

I think it’s like the modern IoT/Smart Home devices and even appliances (Ever heard of Samsung Smart Fridge and iRobots?) but back in the early 00s. And even though The Audrey flopped, this paved the way for future improvements and the device we take for granted today. Much like the Walkman. It failed but paved the way for the iPod and Digital/Internet Music that we use all the time today. Great article BTW. It’s interesting to see internet devices before Google Home/Nest and Amazon Echo were even a thing.

I was fascinated by these when they came out as I thought they did offer a look to the future of connected devices. Like others have commented, it was pretty clear that price vs. functionality was not in internet appliance’s favor. Tech was changing so fast around 2000 that even non-technical shoppers could see that it was better to get a PC or Mac rather than save some money on a small device that looked like it would be quickly obsolete. For more technically minded folks like myself, it might’ve made an interesting kitchen device if it had networking built in and had some way to sync with contacts, calendar and notes with a PC acting as the hub. Fast forward a couple of decades and we have all sorts of smart and connected devices, with the closet to internet appliances being smart phones and tablets.

Had one, it was hacked to run without service. Used it for years as a rotating image photo frame that pulled image files from a network drive and thus had essentially unlimited storage capacity. It was too slow to really do anything else with it. it was a passive matrix screen so not the best and laughable poor by today’s standards but this was still the early 2000s whereby computer equipment was still pretty expensive.

A lot of the features reminds me of the Wii! The automatic website updates, the notification led, almost its aesthetics too. Though the design is truly the in-between of the 90´s and 00’s. Bell Canada did a paid by the minute internet public device (kind of like a futuristic phone booth with Access to the Internet), and it looks like both solutions were released at the same time.

I was the industrial designer for the iPhone that came out (if memory serves) just before Audrey. No…not that iPhone. This was a similar internet appliance to Audrey from a company called CIDCO (literally, Caller ID COmpany – they made caller ID devices back when that was a thing as a standalone product), and they named it iPhone. It must have come out in ’99 or so. Apple had to buy the trademark from them, and the rest is history!

What a time capsule. Cyrix got bought by National Semiconductor, who then faced financial problems. NatSemi sold the Cyrix brand and most tech to Via, but that sale didn’t include the Geode System-on-Chip. Later on, NatSemi decided to exit the CPU market altogether and sold the Geode to AMD. You might know the Geode from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop. AMD only ended the Geode line in 2019.

Dude! I had that Compaq in the ad you showed in the beginning haha. I remember the two speakers that hooked to the monitor, I took them off and spread them out for better dispersion. My mom bought something like this but then ended up getting a iMac (CRT) in red from Circuit City I remember. That was our 2nd Mac, I had the Mac that was a flat desktop with a monitor that sat on top in the early 90’s. I used that Mac to go on AOL 2.6 when I was like 8 or 9 I remember. It was funny because despite the lack of people using the internet I still knew quite a few people in Elementary school that also had it. I totally forgot about the ‘mail in’ manufacturers rebates. I remember a lawsuit over those because of the length of time it took to get your money back. I recall Best Buy being a major player in that whole thing. That’s where I got my Compaq, in 1999 (my 3rd computer), I believe it was $2000? and came with a scanner that hardly ever worked, a printer, the monitor and the humungous tower. It even had a ZIP drive lol…which shockingly my ‘web development’ class in High School had, so it did have its use.

Looking at it, it definitley screams an esthetic of the time where this is still what was thought we would be doing now. Its strange to think how hard it was to fathom everyone having computer phone combos in their pockets like today in the form of smartphones. Like the very one I’m perusal this article and.commenting from. To anyone not born when this device came out or too young to remember, yea we really thought devices like this audrey would the wave of thr future. In fact many SciFi movies especially from the 90s would have devices that looked vaguely similar. Which is why to me this would look perfeftly in place in a movie like demolition man, or any other SciFi future what if movie of the time.

This would’ve been perfect for my older relatives. They struggle with a mouse (move while clicking, which makes it a click and drag) and it’s all a bit “too much” for them. This looks super easy to use. Slow performance would be no problem to them. A more modern version would be a nice thing for older people, I think. Not all older people are bad with computers but some just never tried it and for them this looks great.

Maybe it failed, but I like the fact that the developers had paid some attention to details, like that e-mail notification LED. Even Android phones are now abandoning notification LED’s, and I hate this. Always-on AMOLED text is not equivalent. It is difficult to notice. LED notification is simply the best for letting people know of some events without spending a lot of battery/energy.

I remember how around the year 2000 my dad was telling me how he thought internet appliances were going to be the way we mostly use the internet in a decade or two. His guess was a bit off the mark. Also anyone else think its funny that the Audrey was made by a company that made network cards but the Audrey didn’t come with an Ethernet jack?

Audrey is basically the device that I still think if it existed but was adopted early on by say telephone and other internet providers and given freely to every single subscriber/home, and the development of future versions and models (like every other product) introduces new abilities, features, hardware, etc., with the intent of connecting every home to the internet with this device should they want even a basic connection they don’t have to pay for it, they just get it. Like running phone lines and electricity to every home in America, this is the device that would/should have been in every home. From email, simple live text messaging/chat to other users/homes, deliver the news, weather, etc content. Ability to create a shopping list, reminders, notes to other family members. Have an emergency function to automatically send emergency services your home address, door codes, etc to access your house in an emergency, say, fire, medical emergency automatically at the touch of the SOS button. Just an all around device that would have connected more homes and advanced our technology much further. Perhaps home to home article calls to keep in touch with loved ones, home alarm systems where the device can sense whos home and not, the possibilities are endless – this is essentially the beginning of a SMART HOME HUB.

I can’t entirely fault the Audrey itself for its market shortcomings, it just comes across as a victim of timing to me more than anything else. Too late to effectively cash in on the Internet appliance wave (and with the most likely timeline for its planning/development they probably couldn’t see the cratering prices of real PCs coming), but too early for the right hardware to truly elevate its (likely unintentionally) forward-thinking ideas. Think about it this way: >a streamlined device for bringing Internet to the masses >a suite of personal organization features >simplified websites (or, dare I say, “apps”?) dedicated to singular popular sites/services >a touchscreen interface >basically no real power-off mode, mainly just sleep to still let websites fetch data in the background and to allow for quick user re-entry In terms of inherent functionality (i.e. so besides being portable hardware and having wireless networking), it was basically just a headset away from being an ancestral smartphone, in the way we think of smartphones now. The Audrey and similar Internet appliances simultaneously came too early AND too late onto the market.

i remember this device. this was not the only device like this of its time. for example, there was also the i-opener internet appliance, the virgin web appliance, and later the chumby, which was more of a mini stuffed beanbag email client. the appeal of this was not a replacement to an actual computer, but rather to have an always-on or mostly-on iot-like appliance to complement a computer… a way to access info from the internet outside an office without waiting for your computer to fully boot up and do the usual routine of dialup, opening the application, etc. all of these could be and were hacked/ modified for different added functionality.

I was perusal Will and Grace the other day it was season six and it was a scene in Karen’s kitchen and you could see in the background there is a Audrey in the corner it was like fall 2003 at the time this episode aired but it just goes to show that if you had known your stuff back then that it fit the set dressing

Something like this could have been handy for me because i got so sick of having to deal with all the random bugs and crashes my pc had and i had to share it with my dad and sister but i guess it would have still been too expensive for me to have one for myself and it was probably a really limited device i know browsing the web on something that did not have a mouse or keyboard back then was very annoying and did this thing even support flash and java applets?

7:46 “Never Obsolete” – How adorably naïve. 😂 I remember back in the day, when people wanted to buy a new gaming computer, they’d sell their old obsolete one with descriptions like “good browsing/surfing Internet machine”. These days, webpages are so bloated and require so much power and resources, there’s no such thing as an “Internet computer”, an Internet computer is a gaming rig. My computer can run Farcry, if not Crysis but struggles to load YouTube pages. 😒

I’ve always thought that these would’ve been great for elderly people who wanted to go on the Internet to be able to keep in touch with friends and family who were travelling or lived a long way away (back when long distance phone calls were expensive and Facetime/Zoom/Teams/etc wasn’t yet a thing), but at the same time the elderly people that I knew that wanted to go online for this very reason opted for actual PCs because they just provided way better value for money, plus as well as going online they could play games and stuff (mainly board games and of course, Windows Solitaire)