CIDCO MAILSTATION 100 (STILL WORKING ON IT, but it doesn't look promising at the moment!)

Ok, I must admit it. Since I saw this little thing out in the stores, I was tempted to buy one and see if I could use it without the obnoxious subscription to its original provider.
When I found one unit on sale for less than 30$, I just had to buy it.
After turning it on and going into the setup menu, everything looked promising since it looks like all the nice settings I would like to change are just there... grayed out, but there.
So, it should only be a matter of getting into the program and changing those little codes, right.

Well, next thing, I opened it up and looked inside.
 Here is the back of the main board. Not much to mess with on this side
 There are two programmable chips on the Mailstation. One is right below here here and it is marked 29f080

Here's the other flash memory chip. Actually, it is off the board!

It is a 29f040 that is very hard to solder on anything that would make it possible to program it.

I instinctually took the smallest chip off the board, knowing it would be some time before I could read it and possibly modify it.

At the moment I'm still at this stage. I need to try to mount the chip on some adapter to stick it into my Eprom Programmer. I will be working on it, and I"ll keep you posted.