The Netpliance I-Opener was a marvelous little wonder back in 1999.  It featured a decent 200-MHz Pentium-compatible processor, 32 Megabytes of RAM, and (most important of all) a built-in LCD screen.  You could find these machines in retail electronics stores like CompUSA, and take it home for a mere $99.  Equivalently equipped machines were going for five times that value, by the way, and was being marketed by Netpliance as a hardware loss-leader to entice a novice user into using the more lucrative Internet Services that come bundled with this device.

Along came Ken Segler, a hardware hacker who called himself codeman.  Ken discovered and originated a popular hardware hack that allowed these machines to use (and boot from) a standard 2.5" Notebook drive.  With that hack, a decent notebook drive, and some extra RAM, the I-Opener was able to run normal Operating Systems, like Linux and Windows 95.

Once that discovery was published, a huge following of hardware hackers followed, and thus the I-Opener Hacking Craze had begun.