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Comment by LB232323 | Hacker News Reader

I work as a writer and love the concept, but the size of the screen is the one major drawback. Both the commercialized version ($550!) and the hacker version have tiny screens that do not compare to a laptop with a word processor or a typewriter with standard size paper.

If they scaled the screen size up, I would definitely consider this for professional use. Otherwise, it seems kind of inconvenient compared to the traditional methods.

The most attractive features are the e-ink screen, the long lasting battery, and the minimal design. Writing without getting distracted is more a matter of personal discipline than advanced technology. If anything, having internet access while writing is very convenient for research.

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Some might view that drawback as a plus.

Before the emergence of laptops, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 was incredibly popular with professional writers/journalists. While one might argue that an iPad is better, I think one of the big things going for something like the Model 100 was the keyboard, which made the device worth the bulk.

http://www.oldcomputers.net/trs100.html

The FreeWrite is $550 US

https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-smart-typewriter

looking straight down at a flat screen seems like terrible ergonomics.

It reminds me of the sit-down Space Invaders arcade cabinets. I used to love them as a kid, and I remember the neck aches.[0]

I like the idea of a modern typewriter. I just haven't found any decent implementations that I like yet.

[0]: https://i.warosu.org/data/vr/img/0009/72/1376119589459.jpg

The FreeWrite Traveler[0] seems to be a significant improvement on their older models, and they are offering a pre-order sale price that makes it significantly cheaper than the FreeWrite 2 (I was actually on the verge of ordering one as a birthday present for my writer wife before the current crisis hit). It folds up in a clamshell format for portability and the screen can be angled to be a bit less troublesome for your posture, although the screen size still leaves something to be desired.

[0]: https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-traveler

>> looking straight down at a flat screen seems like terrible ergonomics.

Real typewriters weren't much better though. You were basically still looking down at the piece of paper in the platen.

“Real typewriters”, for much of their lives, were mostly write-only devices. You didn’t interactively edit with a typewriter; you drafted—typing something out without really being able to see the result very well, except when you get a paragraph or so further along—and then, when you were done, you’d pull the sheet out, write editing marks on it (or your editor would), and then you (or a typist) would take the sheet+editing marks and transcribe the result through another typewriter, to get a cleaned result. (Any mistakes made during transcribing would result in starting over on transcribing that sheet. Unless you had one of the fancy typewriters with a secondary white-out ribbon, and the result was just heading for a fax machine anyway.)

Really, it was a major revolution when the first word processors came ‘round, and you got a little LCD display one-line buffer, that you could commit to the paper or re-write.

> were mostly write-only devices.

True.

In the mid eighties though, there were electronic daisy-wheel typewriters (I don't consider those to be word processors in the same vein as the Wang word processors that had full green screens) that had one line LCD screens that would let you edit the line before imprinting it onto the paper.

On a side note, remember how "letter quality" was considered a thing back then, because dot matrix printers could only achieve "near-letter-quality"? Those terms aren't even in today's vernacular.

> Unless you had one of the fancy typewriters with a secondary white-out ribbon,

Even without a fancy typewriter, there were handheld white out sheets you could get, white tape, or you could use liquid paper.

> Even without a fancy typewriter, there were handheld white out sheets you could get, white tape, or you could use liquid paper.

True, but if your transcription was being handled by a professional typist, often the process of handling manual white-out taping (followed by re-feeding/aligning the sheet to its previous position) would be slower than just re-typing the entire page! The secondary white-out ribbons were the only thing I saw used in practice (by anyone other than slow-as-molasses government bureaucracies), because they didn’t require re-feeding the paper.

> True, but if your transcription was being handled by a professional typist...

I tend to think business users at the time had the fancy typewriters or word processors, while home/student users were limited to whatever correction tools they could afford.

As a student, prior to getting a dot matrix printer, I would use either liquid paper or those powdered correction sheets to fix typos.

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