The Java Ring: A Wearable Computer (1998)

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.

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

> the same functionality in a watch or a belt buckle.

Trying to imagine some guy tapping the terminal with his belt buckle :)

I have one of those somewhere, I thought it was a cool piece of tech history.

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.

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"

> 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?

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?

You had Java in your national ID chip, on J2ME phones and under Android.

I still have 2 of these.

Maybe this is what Altman and Ive are working on…

[dead]