It’s nothing new. In fact, many of the comments on this site were made by keyboards with cranks.

Er… I meant to say cranks with keyboards. Sorry. It was a rough weekend.

You have to also hold down `ctrl` [+power], but yes.

Thirty years ago, Apple made a translucent green ADB "keypad" which had a small LCD display (perhaps only two lines of text?) – marketed towards academics, it allowed students to learn touch-typing without the distractions of an entire computer.

Once you were happy with your touch-typed document, you then plugged the "keypad" directly into your Mac's ADB (keyboard/mouse) port... and the thing would sit there and manually re-type your composition into the computer's texteditor.

----

Education needs such "reduced tech" to return to teaching. Think of this one as a "more advanced typewriter" – although I own a few of those, too, and they're fantastic for pure composition.