Cybiko

I texted my wife (then fiance) so much with this thing back in university. I bought two Cybiko Xtremes (still have them, dead batteries) and gave one to her for her birthday, which remembering her face at that moment really makes me laugh now.

Pretty soon though, we were chatting in (e.g. Philosophy of Architecture) class when we weren't playing faux-tetris or some of the other games on there. We had a number of funny conversations that I wish I had saved somehow. A lot of them revolved around our nutty professors, one of whom had started a habit of eating out of a bag of chips while he started his lectures. "crunch crunch crunch so...what is a dwelling?"

At the time I also had an HP Jornada PDA which had some incredible features and a bright color screen, internet connection, etc. but was practically useless for chatting in this way, because there's no way I could have afforded a PDA for my wife. In fact, just comparing Cybiko with the Jornada, pretty much everything except for reading e-books and jotting quick memos was a waste of time on the Jornada. So it's amazing considering the price and hardware differences and how much I was using the Cybiko.

I eventually loaded mine up with just about every app or game I could fit, and combined with my Sony Minidisc player my bathroom sessions at the university library went from like 6/10 (nice bathrooms) to 11/10 (nice bathrooms, ripped Internet radio music, ripoff arcade games).

One of my professors once asked if anyone in class had a timer he could borrow, and when I handed him the Cybiko with the antenna still up, he kind of grabbed the antenna and folded it toward the screen like it was a stylus or something, then started to laugh with the class as it became clear this was the extreme definition of a gadget. One look at the screen, antenna, and all the buttons and most people would say, "what is that thing?"

Finally on my graduation day I was chatting with my wife so much that after receiving my diploma I got mixed up and walked right back into the procession line instead of exiting stage rear. I almost went through twice, and ended up hiding behind a curtain slightly off-stage until the ceremony was over. Texting the whole time, and as my wife explained to my mom what was going on we were all cracking up. lol.

I ported the late, lamented Prex operating system to the Cybiko. It was a bit cramped but worked well enough to... well, okay, it actually worked really badly, but it booted a shell and you could run programs. It'd probably run Fuzix quite well. (Prex is Minix-like and moderately memory-hungry.)

It used an H8 microprocessor which was really rather nice. Tight code and interesting to write assembly for, and the gcc port was decent.

The hardware was interesting if useless; there was a not-quite-proprietary wireless protocol (it was an off-the-shelf low-speed wireless module), a small and primitive LCD, the world's most terrible keyboard (it was genuinely painful to type on), but a decent battery life.

The Prex port is probably useless, but it does come with a Linux tool to upload programs via the Cybiko boot loader, if anyone's interested: http://cowlark.com/cybiko/

I totally had one of these. Actually two of them. Like simcop2387 I bought one originally for WAY too much money, and then 2 years later found another on clearance for $20. I used it for wireless internet in the house—long before we ever got wifi.

This thing was the first MP3 player I ever used, the first handheld organizer I ever used (though dad had a Newton), and the first time I ever really felt like I was using a futuristic tool. The thing could have been awesome.

The one thing I will always remember was that when I was buying it (dad bought it for me for my birthday)—he stopped me and said 'Are you sure you want this? I can get you this or a Palm Pilot'. Without hesitation, I went with the Cybiko. A year later I regretted it so much, but looking back at it now—the Cybiko was awesome and I made the right decision.

I worked at a company that wanted to use these as cheap and disposable PDAs. At the time the Cybiko company was collapsing but they kept promising that new hardware was on the way, presumably to keep us buying their existing stock.

IIRC the SDK consisted of a (limited) C compiler that produced bytecode that the Cybiko ran in a virtual machine. The VM was intended to future-proof the device in case they decided to switch CPU architectures somewhere down the line. A little over-engineered, given its eventual fate.

We got hold of the source code for the Cybiko's web browser because we wanted to do something similar. A PC ran a server component and did all of the hard work interacting with the internet and parsing HTML, while the Cybiko ran a client that connected to the PC over its RF hardware. In the end we didn't get very far - it was my first C project, the SDK wasn't great, and the browser source was written in Russian.

I still have two unopened Xtremes somewhere.

I had one of these when I was younger. So did my brother, very neat devices but we were the only ones in the area that had them. Eventually that got to be fairly pointless so he stopped using his. That was around the time I discovered the SDK that had been published for it. I never did make anything very complicated but I did manage to make a wireless serial repeater with the two of them. It was really great once I got PPP setup to work with an old palm pilot we had and I could get internet on it from anywhere in the house (which largely meant email).

We had a great time talking to David Yang and visiting Cybiko in Moscow when I worked at Palm. Cybiko was an amazing combination of Russian hacking genius, genuine software innovation, and extremely misguided business thinking. Like many failures, it was a Frankenstein combination of like 60% of a great product--for 2010, not 2000, though. Yang was really fun, he showed us 100 kids writing Cybiko games and 250 linguists making NLP software for his other company, which I think still exists. I remember high speed driving around Luzhkov's Moscow, lots of pretty girls, and lots of vodka.

Oh man. This was the first device I ever wrote real programs for. This was the first device that I learned C on!

Nobody would remember it but I authored a few different things I was quite proud of:

- Cybihacker, a Cybiko game that was a very poor RPG game where you're hacking into corporate servers to pay off a debt to the mafia.

- CyX (a custom desktop application)

- SUI (a command line interface)

That was back in the days when my username everywhere was "Compman" – how original. How did I have time to do all of that in school? Wow.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane.

EDIT: Whoa. It looks like you can still download Cybihacker and the unfinished demo of the sequel:

http://forums.planetcybiko.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=9&p=10&h...

http://forums.planetcybiko.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=10&p=11&...

I spent two days getting the thing to run AIM using TWO Cybikos, one plugged into your computer and another attached to the first. Chatting wirelessly on AIM really was a glimpse of the future.

I found an archived yahoo groups posting about it, I think most other information was on geocities. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CybikoDev/conversations/...

I had a Cybiko Xtreme. We had to order it from the USA (I live in Ireland) and it took like 2 months to arrive. It was the coolest thing in the world until I realised that a lot of the functionality was dependant on other people having one too.

Talk about a forgotten throwback!

I had one of these in high school; won it off of some contest or promo. We'd use it during our large school assemblies to chat with each other across the gym instead of paying attention lol

Ashens reviews the Cybiko and Cybiko Extreme on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojatBoMZubk

Where can you get one of these? As a HAM and someone who does a lot of group hiking I am very interested in hacking one of these. Add some solar panels for innawoods charging. Write a program to tune, scan, and communicate over RTTY and Packet. Maybe make a CW transcriber, and add some other software functionality to it and I'd be a really.... happy camper.

Does anybody know if this has been emulated? I think it'd be an interesting little system to mess around on.

I totally won one of these off of CartoonNetwork as a kid. I had setup a couple modems to dial in to the contest number over and over and would listen on the modem speaker until someone picked up then immediately pick up the handset. It never did much but I did learn a ton trying to screw with the OS.

Yea, having a wireless telnet client in the early 2000's was a really cool trick.

The built-in rechargable NiMH batteries in the Cybiko Extreme's are natoriously bad. Mine were very old new-in-box stock when I got them and already had a short life-span. They can sometimes be kicked back to life with a voltage spike. Disconnect the battiery and hit it with a 12V supply (or higher) at a couple amps of current and it will break-up the crystals that form in the battery. Do that for a few minutes. If it works the batteries will immediately start taking a charge again. However after a few months the crystals will reform and you are back to square one. I finally just put a four cell AA battery pack on the back of mine and wired it into the unit.

I had a Cybiko Extreme. It was some really cool tech for the time. That ninja game was the best.

Oh man, I had one of these. Depressing device.

Hey, I just remembered, I've got two of the original Cybikos, bought new (while being sold off at a ridiculously low price -- about £10 each), sitting in my junk room! Never opened, still in the original packaging.

Hmm, decisions. Do I open them up and see if they work, or so I stick them on eBay?

Had one of these, never really used it for anything, though I remember getting it fondly.

I wish it was still possible to buy one relatively cheap in the UK. This was a big part of my childhood. Me and my siblings would communicate with each other around the house and even with neighbours down the block. So many memories.

new & used $35 Cybiko Classic :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0047E4RX6

new $75+ Cybiko Xtreme:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/252054346230

http://www.ebay.com/itm/291518203460

http://www.ebay.com/itm/221242074446

I had one of these, and learned some programming on it. It was super fun!

They should make a modern reboot that connects to the (planned) SpaceX satellites, sell it for $30 or less and in huge volume.

Anyone know which frequency these use to communicate? 26.9650 MHz?

I had one of these. Unfortunately, I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, and so no one else had one. Meaning most of the wireless functionality was useless to me.