Forward-looking companies of the early 2000s weren’t quite sure what to make of the whole “internet” thing, but they were pretty certain that we’d access it on some type of dedicated terminal that had a name starting with a lowercase “i.” Unfortunately for them, they didn’t count on the cost of full-featured computers dropping off a cliff in the very near future. When that happened, it left their underpowered terminals looking like a bad deal, so they found their way onto the clearance shelves before soon disappearing.
Dave Luna still has one of these obsolete machines: a Compaq iPAQ IA-2 from 2000. It originally came loaded with a version of Windows CE that was locked down to browse the web with an MSN dial-up connection. If you had anything else in mind, you…