3Com Audrey

» see ergoaudrey.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in 2000 i was 16, on a 56k modem at ttnet, and the internet at home in ankara was the same beige tower it was in 1998. the 3com audrey was a different cultural object. it sat on the kitchen counter in a san jose suburb, in five pastel colors, and asked $499 to do what a desktop pc was already doing for free in the next room.

3com shipped it october 17 2000 under the ergo brand. inside was a 200mhz amd geode chip with 32mb of ram and 16mb of flash, running qnx underneath a touchscreen and stylus. the cabinet came in pastels with names like meadow and sunshine. it could sync with a palm device over the dock.

3com pulled the plug june 1 2001. seven and a half months of retail life. the dot-com crash was the official cause but the actual problem was simpler. a $499 internet appliance in 2001 could not justify itself against the family desktop pc already in the next room.

after discontinuation, the hardware hacker community adopted it. people figured out how to root the qnx install and ported their own browsers and mp3 players onto the box. the audrey kept doing things on countertops long after 3com had stopped selling it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

3com had been the networking company, ethernet cards and palmpilot. the ergo brand was their consumer-appliance experiment, aimed at the household that already had broadband and might want a second smaller screen near the fridge. the pitch was the family calendar and the weather. middle america at the height of the boom, paying $499 for a calmer second computer.

~ what got buried with it ~

the audrey was part of a small flop wave that included netpliance's i-opener and the cidco mailstation. both tried to sell a household a second cheaper internet box for the kitchen, and both died inside the same 2001 window. by the time wi-fi got cheap enough to make a sub-laptop worth buying, the iphone was already on the horizon, and that whole category was dead before it could be retried.

~ the long tail ~

the small hacker scene that grew up around the audrey wrote the script for every later locked-bootloader fight. people had paid $499 and they wanted root. 3com did not love it but the company was busy dying. by the time the audrey was a memory, the precedent was the right to do what you want with the hardware you bought, and the audrey had quietly trained the people who would carry that argument into the next decade.

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