I worked at Sun and had the ring. We had a great demo where you could walk along a row of Sun workstations, and your X session would move with you, leaping from monitor to monitor, keeping pace with you. The idea at the time was "The Network is the Computer".
IIRC there was some coding that enabled each workstation to know where it was physically, so the security systems could know "User is signed into workstation X, and is requesting a move from workstation X to workstation Y, which is physically one meter away, so AOK to keep signed in."
I had one of these as well as a handful of iButtons. I think I still have them in my box of "maybe this will be useful some day" electronic junk that will never be useful. I got them, as well as some iButton readers of different shapes and sizes, as free samples from Dallas Semiconductor back in 1999 just because I thought they were neat. Never found a use for them, but it was fun to have a "class ring"-size ring that contained some favorite bookmarks.
I have only seen iButton's "in the wild" in one use case - for tracking the nightly rounds of security guards in commercial buildings/industrial complexes. You've probably seem small round discs on the wall in office buildings (normally a round disc with a concentric ring); those are iButton terminals. The guards each have a keychain with an iButton, and as they do their rounds they press it on the terminal to record proof that they went to each terminal at the proper time. Obviously this is a use-case for NFC or a variety of other technologies but for some reason I've seen the iButton-based systems used in a half dozen buildings.
As a youngster, I frequented a laser tag place that issued you an iButton when you registered for a game, containing your player name. When you got into the arena, you would tap the iButton to the laser gun to sign in, so the system knew which gun was in use by which player.
> Obviously this is a use-case for NFC or a variety of other technologies but for some reason I've seen the iButton-based systems used in a half dozen buildings.
If I had to guess, it's probably because another Dallas Semi product, 1Wire, already gets used a lot for things like facilities, and so far as I can tell iButton seems to integrate OK into that whole ecosystem.
iButtons are in fact a 1Wire implementation.
Same. I know I have a couple someplace in a bin. That and another embedded card from the era, but I think it had something like a DIMM footprint. I thought it was also Dallas semi, but I can’t find it or remember what it is though…
I remember thinking that some of the tracking features (temperature) of the button would be helpful in some situations. But the ring was the crazy model. Between these and smart cards, authentication was starting to look futuristic. I even remember getting a smart card reader from my credit card company. They thought it would make for more secure web transactions.
I’ve still seen some iButtons in the wild in odd places. Most recently, I saw them tracking car keys at dealerships. The last car I test drove had a key attached to a fob with an iButton. I was more excited by the iButton tracker than the car.
But I thought of it as an example of how long lasting some design decisions can really be. I’m sure someone designed this system 20-25 years ago and it is still in service today. I’m sure today it would be NFC. But now I’m thinking about what the iButton of 2050 will look like.
I think I’ve seen iButtons used occasionally on self checkouts for staff authentication (age check or the scales fucking up like they always do etc.), although with most they just use a magic barcode or a pin / password.
They're used quite frequently in the UK in bars/pubs where there are several people serving drinks and (I assume) there's some metric tracking by management on till use.
I used to frequent a bar where the staff had Java Rings to authenticate with the register. Touch the ring to the register, enter the order, done. Sadly the bar no longer exists.
I didn't do any research beyond reading the article, but what exactly is Java about this? The gentleman wearing the ring (presumably the author) is using a sun machine, is that what's Java? I understand the Java hype of the time but were we really just calling everything Java? At least JavaScript was influenced by Java, and the JavaStation could remote into a machine running some Java program
In 1998 if you could stick a jvm on it you called it the Java Thing. Java was hot hot hot. Hell, they named javascript after java for no reason at all except some syntactic family resemblance. It was the Java and XML era. Today they'd call it an AI ring or something.
> The gentleman wearing the ring (presumably the author) ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consu...
Oh man, I remember religiously reading his website back in 1999.
OT, but I just noted that https://www.preppylion.com/about-us/ looks strange in my webbrowser because the text has absolutely zero left/right margins...
Yeah, I’ve gotta fix a bunch of CSS there, but I’m focused on the book at the moment.
The ring runs a JVM in hardware.
On a 8051 microcontroller afaik with some crypto acceleration. Stuff like Jazelle came couple of years later.
Probably the programming env, like SIM toolkit.
> the same functionality in a watch or a belt buckle.
Trying to imagine some guy tapping the terminal with his belt buckle :)
And the awkward meeting in HR that followed.
"Why did you think saying 'watch how I transfer my session', and humping your coworker's workstation, was an acceptable idea?"
I have one of those somewhere, I thought it was a cool piece of tech history.
Me, too! I worked at Sun from 2002-2004, and some of us got them as pointlessly fancy door badges for datacenter access. In hindsight it was such a novelty, almost a gag, but they were kind of awesome for what they were. And you felt like an absolute badass when using one to badge in!
> Even 6 K is enough to hold your secret codes, your credit cards numbers, your driver license, other wallet contents, and even some electronic cash.
What was electronic cash referring to in 1998?
Could be one of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
> Chaum published the idea of anonymous electronic money in a 1983 paper; eCash software on the user's local computer stored money in a digital format, cryptographically signed by a bank
For example, the proton stored-value debit card, launched in 1995 in Belgium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(debit_card) or Danmønt, from 1992 in Denmark which was compatible with the domestic Dankort debit card. VISA cash was theoretically available in 1995, and heavily java based according to https://web.archive.org/web/20211222162640/https://www.it.uc...
I remember using the Swedish implementation of Proton[0] to buy a coffee and bun at our high school's cafe and thinking it was so cool
Octopus cards had already been introduced in Hong Kong, and I think similar cards had been trialled elsewhere, so it might be that sort of thing they’re thinking of?
Does it run JavaCard as nearly all debit/credit cards?
Still hard to fathom the exponential of Moore's law-
"took up an entire room and now I can carry more computer power on my finger"
It’s kind of funny that I was just thinking (as in ten minutes ago) it would be really wonderful to be able to wirelessly access login information from my Apple Watch to whatever computer I happen to be using (ideally in a way that doesn’t expose my credentials to a MitM attack). Of course it would have to be an OS-level integration across both Mac and Windows to be really useful, which means that it will probably never happen because capitalism, but I can still dream.
Another article with more details on the device: https://hackaday.com/2024/10/01/java-ring-one-wearable-to-ru...
Even 6 K is enough to hold your secret codes, your credit cards numbers, your driver license, other wallet contents, and even some electronic cash.
Sure, but does it run Doom?
I still have 2 of these.
Maybe this is what Altman and Ive are working on…
You had Java in your national ID chip, on J2ME phones and under Android.
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