Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

There was a similar commercial product, basically a PC keyboard with a small (LCD?) screen, for typing text only documents. It was distraction free, and pretty cheap for something with great battery time. I think notebooks were very expensive back when it was launched.

You'd then download your texts into a computer.

I can't recall the name. I think it ran on regular alkaline AA cells. It attracted a bit of a cult following.

Edit: I think I must be thinking of the Alphasmart line - with products from 1993-2013:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

Back before that, journalists used battery powered versions of the TRS-80 and even a modem to upload their texts to their news magazine.

A modern take is:

https://getfreewrite.com/

View on HN

Back in the day, I had a mobile writing rig consisting of a Handspring Visor PDA, the wonderful Stowaway Keyboard (see http://danbricklin.com/log/stowaway.htm), a word processing app called Wordsmith (http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/2182/review-wordsmith-20/), and a modem that plugged into the Visor’s Springboard expansion slot.

It was great! The whole package fit in a couple pockets, you could turn it on and be typing practically instantly, and the modem made it easy to transfer your work (and also let the setup do double duty as an e-mail terminal). You could print from it wirelessly to any printer that had an IrDA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Data_Association) port. And the whole thing ran for ages on a couple of AA batteries, which were cheap and universally available when you needed to replace them. The only downside was the Visor’s low-res monochrome display, but for writing that wasn’t too serious a limitation. I still miss that rig.

The AlphaSmart products seemed like an attempt to bundle this kind of cobbled-together DIY rig into a single product with everything included in one box. I never had the chance to use them, but I was disappointed they never seemed to find an audience.

Take a look at this Z80-based product, released in 1987 too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88

An old friend had one, and transferred text back/forth with a serial-connection.

I still have a Z88 somewhere in here (my office) ...

It's the granddaddy of the modern PDA and smartphone; anecdotally, some time in 1989-ish John Sculley was chairing a meeting of Apple execs and realized half of them were typing on these weird black plastic things the size of a pad of paper. Sculley wanted a pen rather than a keyboard, but got the idea that maybe Apple should develop something along these lines: a mobile computer companion device for note-taking, calendar, and productivity (back in the days when a Macintosh Portable cost $5000 and weighed 10kg because of the lead-acid batteries).

That thought eventually turned into the Newton, and the Newton in turn gave Palm their start (initially as a platform for Graffiti).

In the late 70's and early 80's there were really high end CRT word processors from companies like Xerox, Wang and Burroughs. I recall managers debating buying these versus general purpose computers.

At the time, that's mostly what you did with general purpose computers...WordStar or similar. Spreadsheets hadn't really taken off yet.

Edit: Check Google for the Xerox 860. It was the Cadillac at the time. https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=488

I had a summer job around 1990 as a word processor using a Wang and a dictaphone. While this was definitely at the end of the era of the dedicated word processor, it was an interesting environment to be in. I was one of two dedicated word processors at the company.

It was quite a different world back then, because I would type up a lot of memos that would get physically posted on bulletin boards in public areas, and cc: (carbon copies), while no longer using carbon paper, meant that you were making physical cc's that were being distributed manually.

I remember being very productive with WordStar, with muscle memory better than what I have now with vim. I could type like the wind, make corrections, reformat, and print in a sort of "out of body" way where my thoughts just flowed.

I haven't really experienced that since. Maybe the single tasking environment kept me more focused.

Well, back in those days, styling choices could be incredibly limited (depending on whether you were using a green screen vs gui), especially if the word processor's output was limited to a daisy wheel printer.

I think the vast number of styling and formatting options these days can easily distract writers from... writing, which is probably why Markdown and focused writing tools have become so popular.

Very true. WordStar gave me headings, bullets, bold, italic, etc. But not much more. Kept my focus on the words.

You may find WordGrinder by David Given a treat. It is the most close resemblance of WordStar experience nowadays and it is free.

Amen. <ctrl>KP to my friends. I will check it out. The link: http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html

I remember playing with a Vydec word-processor as a kid and thinking it was the coolest thing ever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com