Lisp-powered laptop with a battery life measured in years
hackster.io
hackster.io
I also looked into transflective / reflective LCDs as an alternative to e-paper. I haven't built anything though, for various reasons (mostly excuses, if I'm honest! Life is hard, I am busy, but I guess that's true for everyone..).
Are there any other similar devices (or projects actively being developed) with a battery life measured in years?
My current understanding is that I would need to study electrical engineering to have the skills to build something like this, is that true? I have been making some slow progress towards that (learned C, studying assembly, brushing up on my math, studying calculus etc).
But a full EE degree does seem like overkill: I looked at the coursework at a university near me, and it has you learning about optics and quantum physics... so it really seems like most of the work is unrelated to the actual goal of building tiny computers.
Is there a way to find or create a curriculum focused specifically on the things you actually want to build? (If not, I expect there will be in a year or two, at the rate AI is developing ;)
Or perhaps I'm looking at it backwards, has this tech progressed to the point where it is possible to just start building without really knowing what you are doing, and learn as you go along?
The rest you learn along the way.
As for the eInk laptop, I have that eDream as well. The hack I wanted was to use an LCD panel across the top for live editing, undo, etc. And then once the line was done, the eink display would wake-up, take the new line of text and write it to the display and then go back to sleep.
A couple nice eink options for the discriminating hacker
Well, don't leave us hanging, do recommend a book to start with
https://hackaday.com/2017/01/18/forrest-mims-radio-shack-and...
My recommendation for a current book, that is affordable is
"Practical Electronics for Inventors" by Paul Scherz
I think learning what common design practices like bypass caps, knowing when to apply certain formulas and when not (ohm's law / linear/non-linear components), and knowing where to find help when needed, especially for circuit review, was crucial.
Download kicad and watch a few videos and most software devs I know would figure out enough in a short amount of time.
Bonus points if you understand constraint systems because that's pretty much the entirety of CAD.
I looked into this a bit a while back as well. I was disappointed in how few options I could find. What seemed like the best option out there for me is the monochrome SHARP Memory Display Breakout that is used in the Playdate handheld console.
I can't find the 4.4" version mentioned in the article though, the biggest I've found if 2.7".
If you haven't already, get "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill - that alone will tell you enough to many things.
1) China and "the East" have a dominance in hardware. I don't think this is strategically good. I think we need a lot more skills in hardware electronics, especially if we electrify all our transport and have PV everywhere.
2) I think it is good for the environment: more broken crap can be recycled to adhoc devices and other uses, or might (gasp) be repaired.
3) It will help us be more creative with hardware to maintain the innovator's edge.
4) It will help with onshoring production for supply chain security. This is a country-level existential threat right now. Consider that COVID, which by all historical standards is a very very very weak pandemic, caused such disruption and insecurity in our day to day supplies.
5) I just get the sense that software innovation is declining, well, before chatGPT, but it seems we had a solid decade of "what's the next social network" was the height of software innovation. Um, no it's not, that is deck chair reshuffling.
Of course corporations don't like it, so oh well, it'll be dead on arrival.
Hey! I used to have those two and assembly on my resume as the only entries under "Programming Languages" !
Very nice project.
Have not started working on wireless yet but I hope to get to it. The SoC i use has Bluetooth. Using it for a remote shell would be amazing.
Not many features of note - it runs arbitrary lisp code, has a simple graphics interface. You can save and load code and data/text files to SD card.
The processor is the Ambiq Apollo3 Blue, which is really what makes running arbitrary code with such low power consumption possible. 48/96MHz, 384k of RAM. https://ambiq.com/apollo3-blue/
There's an Apollo4 which is faster and has way more memory, but it's a tiny BGA chip which doesn't have an Arduino core and I don't have the skills to work with that (yet ...)
I hope to create a PCB for it at least, it would make the device tiny and sleek and make it a lot easier for others to reproduce. But I haven't been able to learn PCB design yet.
One other thing, I don't see the stl/cad files for the case anywhere, I assume you're still iterating on that. Very cool project!
however, if you have the sd card powered on all the time it will cut your battery life by about a factor of 30
PS. although, the RP2040 has 2 cores and programmable IO controllers, which IIRC were pretty needed to deal with the low memory (and sound). I don't know how this chip compares.
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/doom-comes-to-raspberry-pi-...
so that gray piece on the right is the solar collector, right? since it can go 2 years, what's to stop it from going forever? what if you added a 2nd collector on the left? how big would the solar panel need to be in order for it to run indefinitely?
Super job!
Replace the battery every few years and you're set. Rely upon mass production, standard part numbers and highly recyclable parts (lead acid wins at this).
-------
Lead Acid is particularly good at UPS style power usage patterns. It's very easy to perpetually trickle charge lead acid.
------
If you're set on Li-ion, then use a standard 18650 cell, so you know that you'll always be able to buy a replacement. But given the attributes I see here, lead acid probably wins. So you have to replace a part every 3 years that costs $5 to $10, big whoop.
I do consider it effectively an apocalyptic kind of battery design. It was invented in the 1800s, its chemistry is incredibly simple (Sulfuric Acid + Lead), and is very well studied.
He reports that it's a "very complex electrochemical device".
The USPTO (?) has assigned the code H01M10/06 to lead-acid battery patents. https://patents.google.com/?q=(H01M10%2f06)&oq=(H01M10%2f06) finds 44'593 patents in this category. You don't need any of them to get a working lead-acid battery, but a significant subset of them are going to be helpful. Some are order-of-magnitude improvements.
But I'm a poor student of modern history. Just throwing out a guess for now.
But again, I'd say that Eastern European modern history is my weakest subject by far. I probably should avoid talking about this subject lol.
Really? What? Put on a tiny black and white display?? No backlight?? Tiny processor?? No SSD?? No HDD??
I mean, this is awesome. And look forward to see where it is going. Not sure what Dell and Apple will learn??
> Dell and Apple can learn that there are consumers out there who want low cost minimalist options with long battery lives and long operational lives.
They don't want their business and low marigin sales.
Also Macbook air has what, 18 hours of battery life ? That's enough for vast majority of users.
The real advantage of long battery life isn’t so much the duration when new but both reducing the number of charge cycles and preserving battery life as the device ages.
I don't mean this in a "capitalist bad" way, it's mostly great but there are certain innovations and technologies that don't fit well with a need to get the most return possible on capital invested. There's a "dead space" of techs that would benefit everyone, need some capital to create - but don't allow a lot of value to be captured.
A bit like how we see more VC excitement about "vat grown meat" (a centralised industrial model that exacerbates supply chain dependency and further alienates people from their food - but is perfect for capturing value) vs working on "super potatoes" or algae-based systems that would be low-dependency and could scale down to individuals.
Orthodoxy is that government is supposed to help with this stuff but they have their own incentives (some of them a result of industry capture) which rarely align with decentralisation, degrowth or reduced dependency. For example recent battles to get laws passed to even allow you to repair your own stuff.
The number of consumers who not only complain about planned obsolescence but also put money where their mouth is, is tiny. It's easy to get people on board with the idea behind projects like Fairphone, but then they do a price comparison and buy a cheap Huawei.
The market for Linux laptops is already a small niche and those aren't all that limiting for users when it comes to processing power and software support. Now take away the modern web browser and very few people would consider it for anything more than a little tinkering.
Have you run any tests to see if active mode is indeed the mode you're in most of the time? Or is it possible that other uCs that could have better sleep current can beat your uC of choice?
Screen -- I like the Sharp in pixel memory LCD screens, though 4 inches is a bit small. A bigger screen would be what I'd be searching for, but I also know that monitors use a surprising amount of power, and 4 inches is the biggest memory-LCD screen in my area as well.
E-ink, for all of it's faults, does climb to 7+ inches and beyond. But changing eink screens is surprisingly power hungry.
Bluetooth -- lol, there goes the power budget!! This uses what? Probably 10x more power than everything else combined? I/O is a necessity and it's a good feature, but I really do wish* it used less power.
There is clearly a crossover point at which this combination would use lower power, because the e-ink display uses zero power when not updating, and the memory-in-pixel LCD uses power even to retain the display. So as the update rate goes low enough, at some point the e-ink display will use less power. My vaguely remembered estimate of this crossover point is that the e-ink display starts using less power than the memory-in-pixel LCD when the update rate is less than about one update per hour.
probably without showing evidence, neither of us will convince the other
E-paper has some real advantages over memory-in-pixel LCDs: as I said in the other thread, the whites are whiter, it's not glossy, it can do grayscale, some versions can even do color, it's available in larger panel sizes, it existed in 02007 when Amazon launched the Swindle, and it can continue to display Amazon advertising even when the device is entirely powered off.
None of these are true of memory-in-pixel LCDs (though the Playdate does display advertising on its memory-in-pixel screen when it's "off").
Moreover, the computing power budget for the Swindle and similar e-readers is also measured in hundreds of milliwatts, just like the screen. There's not much reason to worry about whether your screen uses 100 microwatts or 100 milliwatts if your CPU is using 200 milliwatts. Reducing your power consumption by 50% or 5% is never a critical factor in the success or failure of your product, because you could just add another 50% in battery weight if it were.
Ambiq didn't even exist until 02010, and didn't sample the Apollo3 until 02018, so to get even a single order of magnitude improvement in CPU power usage, Amazon (or competing vendors) would have had to cut the compute budget for e-readers by an order of magnitude, probably resulting in major increases in space usage, reductions in rendering quality, sluggish interactions, or all three, and certainly increasing development cost. Ambiq's CPUs are fast enough, but you can't just drop them into a new model of Swindle or Kobo and keep the same software; they have tiny onboard RAM, little support for offboard RAM (which would make power consumption balloon anyway), and no MMUs, so they can't run either Linux or any of the other e-reader software that's been developed for existing devices—it needs way too much memory.
There's a lot of different eink and memory-lcd screens that could explain the difference between your calculation and mine. But all else considered, 15-minutes vs 60-minutes isn't much of a difference at all.
For most applications of updates-per-second (or at worst, a few seconds per update), low-power monochrome seems best served by Sharp's memory-lcd.
A thing I didn't mention is that there are actually eink applications that have lower update rates than this. Store price tags, for example.
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https://www.pervasivedisplays.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12...
Pervasive Displays has an oscilloscope measurement of 3.75mA on their 5.9-second updates for their 1.54" eink screen. (Page 14). That's 22.125 mCoulombs of electrons.
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https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Sharp%20PDFs/LS0...
Sharp 1.2" memory-LCD (a bit smaller) has 12uW to 50uW on static images. Assuming 3.3V, that's 15uA worst case (0.015mA).
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22.125 mCoulombs / 0.015mA == 1475 seconds per update break-even point, or ~24 minutes.
So yet another number, but yeah, memory-LCD is just really good. Remember that the 1.2" screen from Sharp is a bit smaller though, so its not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison.
Either way, its a much longer period between updates than I was expecting.
I'm sure other uCs could sleep at lower power, but active mode was what I wanted to optimize for.
Is that using the FPU, or are you doing all the fractal math in integer? I have this vague idea that using the FPU might cause it to use more power than integer code will (and might or might not be faster for fractal rendering).
48MHz is the most power efficient mode, you can run it at 96Mhz "burst mode" but apparently it uses disproportionately more power, I have not measured how much.
Does this display have the same nominal 2Mbps speed as the 2.7" one I've been using? I've seen people report that it works well at 6Mbps (and thus 60 Hz) but haven't tried it myself. I'm guessing that it would use more power.
Have you been able to measure how much of the power consumption is the display?
Approximately 25%-50% of the total power depending on refresh rate. Worst case seems to be alternating black and white pixels, maximizing the number of transitions?
So the display is about 25% of the 4.9 mW number? That's exciting! How often are you toggling the polarity of the LCD field? I've noticed that when I unplug the display it continues to display the same data for about 30 seconds on what is presumably the screen capacitance, but the datasheet minimum clock for that is IIRC 10 Hz, and as I understand it, never switching the polarity will eventually destroy the liquid crystals.
One of the things I really hate about normal computers is how high the interaction latency is, and one of the really appealing things about these displays to me is the possibility of getting much lower interaction latencies using partial screen updates, down in the submillisecond range (plus 10–20 ms for the crystals to fully change state, but it should be visible before that).
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I have seen a Swindle do partial screen updates much faster than 1000 ms. In fact, I originally wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/inexorable-misc/tetris.html to play in the browser on a Swindle, with update times of more like 100 ms. And I successfully used IRC on it, too.
The E-Ink display does have some good points: it's not glossy, it's available in bigger sizes, its whites are whiter, and it can do grayscale. But, for interactive computing, I think those aren't a good tradeoff for being orders of magnitude worse at power consumption and update times.
With the right interface and design, it feels fine. In particular, Jubeat has a different note assigned to each screen so the divisions feel very natural.
First hit from YouTube: https://youtu.be/LSGOAkyFW7I
Or maybe just natural to people who put in a bit of practice, lol. This is an expert level song pattern, it's not so bad at earlier levels. But it still shows off how the 4x4 screen effectively communicates a variety of button press timings to the player, combo counters, life, scrolling and other such details for this game.
How long can battery last for that base spec, with say 10", 13" models?
1. How did you find working with the Sharp Memory display as a tinkerer? Did you like building with it and would you recommend it? It's pretty new tech to me and I've been mulling whether to splurge for it for a potential pet project of mine.
2. How's the refresh rate on it? Judging from your video it looks pretty dang swell. It looks to be a lot faster than the typical 15hz one sees on higher end e-ink displays available right now.
Official refresh rate is ~25 hz, unofficially they seem to be able to go a lot faster (2-3X) if you don't mind increasing power consumption. And it's faster if you update only some lines. But by then you have run into a limitation in how fast the liquid crystal can respond.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35077859
>We extract energy from (...) button presses of a regular Game Boy, using mechanical off-the-shelf button press harvesters. (...) The energy from the buttons is rectified, boosted, and stored in small capacitors.
Eriksen's PotatoP project page: https://hackaday.io/project/184340-potatop
His GitHub page: https://github.com/andreer/PotatoP/
My Zorzpad Git repo, in Spanish: git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/zorzpad.git
(There might be some information in there of use to Eriksen, too, for example about Flash. And maybe in Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua.)
My previous comment on here about the hardware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30691361 three days after Eriksen's first update on the Hackaday project log. I didn't get the idea from him, but I think I hadn't written about it publicly before that, so he probably didn't get it from me either. How did we end up deciding to do almost exactly the same project a few days apart, when the parts had been available for years? Maybe the Playdate is responsible?
As for the battery, my theory is that by not having a battery I can get much higher reliability, because the battery and the charging port are the things that usually limit the life of portable computers. Submilliwatt personal computing is the means to that end.
It's really inspiring to see someone achieve what I've been dreaming of!
I would not be surprised if it's simply the availability of the good-enough CPU that caused the idea to take root in multiple heads independently.
initrd has gathered a lot of resources in https://hackaday.io/project/177716-the-libre-autarkic-laptop and https://github.com/EI2030, he sent me a link to your writing a while back and it made me think of using an sd card for storage, which I had previously rejected for taking too much power. But I have since managed to only power it when reading/writing files and it works quite well.
For the Zorzpad's main nonvolatile storage my plan is to use bare SLC NAND Flash, but I'll have to write to it fairly slowly to get to my desired design lifetime. So my initial plan of a KeyKOS-like or EUMEL-like transparently persistent system with huge virtual memory is out the window.
If your limit is only the power budget, though, that approach seems like it might be within reach; the energy-autonomous-computing note I mentioned above has a table of memory types and their energy consumption, and if I didn't fuck up the calculations, NAND Flash only costs about 10 nJ per byte to write. So a full memory snapshot (384 KiB) every 30 seconds (104 kbps) would only cost about 130 μW, and if your Lisp (or other virtual machine) can keep track of what data is dirty, it should be a fraction of that.
I'm glad to hear my notes have already been useful to you! I'm sure yours will be for me, too. And thanks for the links to initrd's work! I somehow didn't know about it.
on that one, a little capacitor in the parenthesis keys would probably make that solar panel unnecessary.
ZF Electronics used to be called Cherry Industrial, which was until a few years ago part of the same company as Cherry AG who make the famous keyboard switches.
Edit: Oddly, the product page is viewable if you enter the product ID from the tail end of the URL into the product search field.
They were just the thing to write rants on, you could truly put some feeling into your writing. Rant loud enough and you'd type holes instead of o's. Overdo that underline and it'd end up splitting the page for real.
https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/ZF/AFIG-0007
> on that one, a little capacitor in the parenthesis keys would probably make that solar panel unnecessary.
... ye, you probably can get it with $20 only.
Perhaps you could have the whole keyboard floating on a pivot like a see-saw, with one of these switches beneath it at the right and left side of the pivot (say beneath s and ; keys). That way any key press off-center would have a chance of activating one of the two switches, and keys closest to the far left and right would have a greater probability of activating them. The keyboard would have a slight wobble.
You can find the spec at the manufacturer site.
Also, would this hardware be sufficient to run a terminal and SSH client? I'm thinking about the overhead of encryption and constantly open TCP socket streaming packets back and forth over Wi-Fi.
I don't think this first iteration even has a network stack, is that right? Is having Wi-Fi even on the table as a realistic design target?
Edit: Thank you @reerdna for all the helpful information. 40 days of activity on a single charge would still be pretty compelling :). Heck, even a full week or two of constant general purpose use would be amazingly better than than current laptops which last only 2-12 hours of active use (at best).
I have SSHed into a Microvax II some times, this is 50 times faster. So possible, definitely.
No network stack yet, although the chip has bluetooth so it'd be possible to make that work, perhaps with a "gateway" device. But it would likely increase power use by 5X.
You know, like in the moview Brazil?
I also had to add some error handling patches which someone had shared in the ulisp forum (because you don't want the REPL to crash if you have a typo)
Working with uLisp is fun - it's not super fast and it does have a few limitations and gotchas, but it was by far the easiest option for this project as so much was already supported. And the documentation and community is very nice.
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project...
Wikipedia provides downloadable data dumps, I guess that's one way to start.
You may also want to check out http://collapseos.org/.
Print it out
I have experimented with adding Uxn support, which may be similar to Forth in many ways? https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/GA144.ht...
The fast response time is the key, I was expecting it to be like an e-ink display!
http://www.ulisp.com/show?383X
Could a Z-Machine interpreter (Emacs has one in Elisp, Malyon.el) run fast enough on this? v3 version, nothing fancy. v5 and v8 games would require a bit more power.
Here you have:
Edit: Lenovo has them too I see. But because they need high processing for 'most' people, they don't have batteries and have cables. If you don't want to watch tv, play games etc, but just program Lisp and sync via BLE, I wonder if it's possible to make it very low consumption just on the glasses. I know that chipsets, including with BLE can be very low consumption. But I'm not sure if projecting the image at high enough res is possible on that low consumption, so that is my question if someone knows?
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/1/23332907/lenovo-glasses-t1...
I still don't like it:
- a quality implementation of any Lisp is _not_ easy, e.g. just look at SBCL or Chez Scheme
- minimalistic implementations are a selling point, but I take Lua over any minimalistic Lisp anytime. Chances are that a Lua interpreter library will be smaller. Micropython runs on anything slightly more powerful than Arduino nowadays and gives you objects and async on an effing microcontroller.
- developer experience is miserable/ascetic, even compared to Lua (maybe except Clojure). Things we take for granted (dictionaries/hashmaps/object properties) are still missing from Lisps.
- structural editing is now available for any language that supports a proper language server (which almost any modern language does). s-exprs failed to become a common data language for anything. It's possible to have a simple and humane syntax at the same time (Zig, Go, Lua)
- I've learned to avoid macros and dynamic code generation unless I have a very good reason to use them in any language, otherwise they are a code smell.
It was painful for me to watch the video in the article where the author counts parenthesis and gets the job done in spite of the language, not because of it.
I thought this video would get maybe 100 view at most, or I would have put more effort into it (like implemented paren matching in the editor first).
I like lisp (and apparently it's good HN bait). But the language is not really the core of this project.
It is more about making a truly personal computer. One that doesn't require you to think about charging or software updates. That is always fast and responsive and ready to use as it is never doing something strange in the background. Simple enough for me to feel like I understand how everything works.
And writing your own OS for it is easy if you wanted to - you could implement forth, lua, a small C compiler - whatever you wish, and these properties would still be preserved.
Useful? Probably not. Fun? At least for me it is.
It was just me and my pet peeve that Lisps stopped being a superpower decades ago.
* Lisp: http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html * Beating the averages: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Other notable programmers have mentioned this. I can think of Yegge's article (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab...) where he mentions this:
> ...It's dirty laundry that needs airing. The problem: Paul Graham. I mean, the guy's a genius, and I love reading his essays, and his startups are doing great things, etc. etc. You can't fault him. But he's created something of a problem. > Before Paul Graham, Lisp was dying. It really was, and let's not get all sentimental or anything; it's just common sense. A language is always either gaining or losing ground, and Lisp was losing ground all through the 1990s. Then PG came along with his "I'm not talking to you if you're over 26 years old" essays, each a giant slap in our collective face, and everyone sat up and paid attention to him in a hurry. And a TON of people started looking very seriously at Lisp.
In addition, HN itself is written in a dialect of Lisp called Arc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
This is why you can't trust HN as the general opinion among people or even programmers. They are a very specific subset of programmers who are more likely to be interested in things like Lisp.
Weird argument to close an otherwise excellent comment. I'd rather listen to the opinion of someone that also knows niche things, than one that only knows the mainstream and nothing else.
Also which group is more likely to create beautiful products such as a portable Lisp machine?
No, the parent comment meant that HN users are not a representative cross-section of programmers in general. This manifests itself, for example, in relatively niche languages being mentioned and discussed disproportionately often.
In other words: just because HN loves it doesn't mean everybody else knows it.
Nobody mentions them much here for some reason, but also the books ANSI Common Lisp and On Lisp, at one time considered almost essential reading. I still think they're fantastic but they're not for instant gratification as they don't give you much in terms of immediate practical applications or real world system examples. Nevertheless they are among my favorite books on programming and I wouldn't be surprised if many people who come here similarly "cut their teeth" with those books.
It was the scripting language for Autocad before being replaced by .NET.
It is the scripting language for Gimp alongside Python (which came later).
It powers Google's travel agency (CTA)
Is powers the Syscog infrastructure (a company for trains and trucks management software/hardware)
It powers NuBank (alongside Erlang).
Just a couple of examples.
I personally believe everyone should try different paradigms and languages even if you never use them. First of all it will help you see patterns later on, which results on learning whatever programming language in a very short time when you need it. And it opens your eyes to how powerful some of them are, and even to get most out of your ‘day job’ language.
There was someone on Twitter who was programming c# fulltime for a decade or so, and didn’t know you could ‘int i=0; for(;i<x;i++)’. Then the comments saying ‘oh I thought that was only c/c++’. That is a fundamental lack of understanding; how do they think this works? Magic? When you have seen many languages, you discover interesting properties that are normal in other languages but still possible and actually beneficial in your most used one. Lisp/Scheme deepdives are known to give this type of insight that will stay with the professional developer forever, making them better, not necessarily using Lisp.
I've often thought about how the PDAs of yore (and Nokia dumbphones) had monochrome LCD screeens that were perfectly usable for text and had week-long battery life.
It's something I'm hoping will make a comeback as more people begin to realize that the "there's an app for that" mentality is leading to the creation of apps that aren't necessarily the right fit for a smartphone anymmore.
Mods, I think the hackaday link is far better, it doesnt show a login popup that comes up multiple times. https://hackaday.io/project/184340-potatop
I loved my TI-83, wrote games and crude 3D graphics on it high school math class.
More useful would be runtime of the system on battery (which I'm guessing doesn't make a great headline) as well as the output wattage of the built in solar panel.
Here's the datasheet for your (or a similar) display (PDF) https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Sharp%20PDFs/LS0...
..250 µW average power consumption on your display panel.. well, maybe that's not so preposterous after all, great work
eh, I don't see why. Solar pocket calculators were still sold with the understanding that their function and lifespan hinged upon the chemistry of the internal battery.
it's not like these things can function without some form of capacitance, and getting that to last a long time is tricky.
It seems like a monumental failure of the computer industry that we still don't have the equivalent in laptop form. None of my portable computers will come out of a forgotten drawer 50+ years from now and readily turn on.
I recently bought an old keyboard (an old IBM M4-1, a PS2 keyboard / trackpoint combination thing) -- it's from 1994 and needed a couple adapters, but connected to my macbook pro just fine, and worked pretty well.
OS2 won't know modern TLS and the keyboard doesn't have the command / meta / windows / open clover shift keys, they do fine.
My old HP calculator from high school didn't work when I tried it out...
This doesn't mean that the laptops battery life is measured in years.
Take that, Lenovo!