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Comment by happy_path | Hacker News Reader

Are we going to see old refurbished devices be sold as distraction-free machines?

Does a new market for somewhat-luddite computers exist? I'd like to buy something like the freewrite [1] but cheaper, any suggestions?

[1] https://getfreewrite.com/

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You mean as a new type of mass marketed device rather than someone's hobby business that could fail and they wouldn't be economically impacted?

Based on the fact that this is not new in the slightest, and the last 20 years is full of people mocking DOS because it's from an era long gone by but then discovering very specific niche industries or suddenly-well-known individuals still using DOS applications... No. No we are not. There is no market here, there are only individuals who made a choice and stuck with it.

For DOS specifically, there is a market. So much of one that I can buy PCs with FreeDOS preinstalled. DOS, specifically, is used in many embedded applications that do not require multitasking (digital display boards, point of sale systems, etc.). That's not exactly addressing the question, but one of the things that makes a successful business is finding a niche and exploiting it and though there may not be a mass market consumer market, there are definitely companies making money with "old tech".

Who sells new hardware with FreeDOS support? That's cool.

Until fairly recently, Dell. However, I can't find that option anymore when specing a new PC, so perhaps I'm wrong about that. I think HP does as well.

For many years after OS/2 faded from consumer view, I think there were ATMs that ran on it.

I'm not in the industry, and don't know if there are any more.

kobowriter[0], which repurposes a Kobo e-reader along with a USB-keyboard was earlier on HN[1]. The thread has a few more suggestions.

[0]: https://github.com/olup/kobowriter

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28426741

I've had similar experiences with green screen enterprise manufacturing software. It had a remarkable amount of features that were accessed via nested command sequences that didn't take too long to learn, and could easily handle 800 users simultaneously with no lag or interruption.

I watched some order takers at a food service company a few years back. They worked in a green screen program -- not sure if it was DOS, or some terminal.

The speed at which they worked was unreal. Their hands never left the keyboard. They knew where everything was, and they could literally retrieve any information in less than one second, both due to the speed their fingers worked on the keyboard, and the responsiveness of the app.

I remember thinking that I need to pay more attention to keyboard-only usage of the next app I write.

Agreed, it's as though all features were organized carefully into a B tree that became polished over the years.

I met a guy some years back who specialized in rewriting accounting software user interfaces. He was a former accountant, so he knew all the things that accountants needed to do with software and the order things tended to need to happen. He focused a lot on input order flow. He claimed that the reduced cost of data entry easily paid for his services for his clients, and made the people using the software happier too.

You really don’t want someone good with reverse 10-key data entry to constantly be moving back to a mouse and try to click on some random button or input box.

Alphasmart

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

I had a Neo2 for a while. Transferring is weird but it is just a USB keyboard that types whatever is in memory making it future-proof.

I think the Dana has an SD card if that's more your thing. Those things are also pretty indestructible and relatively cheap on ebay.

If you're running Linux you can change some settings and boot to console instead of the GUI. The GUI is still there but you have to leave the console environment to get to it.

I'm not quite hardcore enough to actually do this though. I tend to do my personal browsing in Firefox, work browsing in Chromium, and media viewing in Chrome. By "work browsing" I mean only technical stuff directly related to my job - HN counts as personal. When I want to concentrate I just `pkill firefox` and all the distractions go away. Works pretty well most of the time.

Obviously I'm distracted right now.

I know that owning dedicated hardware is appealing, but - why not solve the problem on a software level? Install Linux and then disable/remove the TCP/IP stack (and associated tools) as much as is practical, and use a USB drive to get your creations onto your main computer.

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