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Yes, but Alphasmart was self-contained, and had 100s of hours of battery life.

Except for the part about "Three AA batteries power it for up to 700 hours". Not having to carry a power adapter nor worrying about battery life is really nice.

I've always liked WordGrinder. It runs in the terminal/console!

http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html

That's what I use! It's pretty minimal by modern standards but might still be too full-featured for AlphaSmart simulation.

I like this idea. Like having a grub boot option for GhostWriter (https://www.linux.com/news/ghostwriter-linux-distro-writers/) or something similar.

Dell used to include a minimal Arm/Linux system inside some of their laptops as an instant-on, long battery life option. No idea whether anyone actually bought them though.

Got any more info on this? Like what models? Sounds really interesting to me.

Dell Latitude On I think:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitude_ON

Doesn’t look like it ever took off - I helped port an office suite to it.

Cool! Just found some youtube videos of it.