I fairly frequently leave my phone in the office and take a clipboard full of lined paper and a ballpoint to a place where I can write without access to the internet - I've got a number of published CS papers and at least one funded grant where a significant amount of writing was done in longhand on paper.

Of course this would require a bit of software work and maybe a brain swap to make it into the sort of portable typewriter that I'm really looking for, but given this as a starting point it should be fairly easy.

One question I have - what is the finished weight?

It's fun to push old hardware to the limits and develop software/hw for it (such us wifi for apple 2 from 1979 hehe)

Clunky hardware has one advantage too: It's usually a single tasking tool. Great for focus and running away from WWW.

Your kid can play pac-man and Tetris without fear of popups, credit cards, scams, hate and porn.

Caveat: such a device should not be infested with shitty spyware like everything else these days.

I use an iPad with a keyboard when I need this kind of “writing room” thing, but I know someone who uses an ancient electronic typewriter.

FWIW when my disorganisation is catastrophic, I go out for a walk, leave my phone at home if I can, sit on a bench, and try to organise my life in one side of A4. And then if there’s a task that I can start by writing, I do it there, with a pen.

Though, considering all the model 100s I keep staring at are in the range of $600-1000, tradeoff seems acceptable.

I think as well about that… as well as the work I do that pays my bills, and how efficiently I need to do it to keep my job.

I get nostalgic after Psions. Small clamshell designs are great - I can do work on the go without lugging a fragile laptop!

Well, no, actually - I need to do things in R, _quickly_, at a speed and efficiency that wasn’t possible back in the 90s. And by the time I’m done I don’t have any patience for the virtues of “distraction free computing”!

Edge to edge high resolution screens that can simultaneously show graphics and an terminal and a ChatGPT session. The ability to constantly pipe large datasets into memory to and from disk, while holding up to R’s profligate use of memory.

I’m just not meaningfully productive otherwise. So: I would love this, but it would be a toy that I’m sure I’ll use for a bit while I wax nostalgic about the mythical days people did everything on a VT-100.

But I am also 55, and my eyes can't deal any more with a screen less than 11" in a general-purpose computing device (as opposed to a phone or tablet, which have an OS and GUI designed for the small screens), so my portable devices are now a Chuwi Minibook X and a Thinkpad X13. The Thinkpad is a revelationm as despite its size it is lighter than almost anything else, including an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard.

https://www.typeframe.net/docs/ps-85

The keycaps are the semiotic iconography designs created for Alien (1979):

https://wharferj.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/ron-cobbs-alien-se...

…not that anyone here didn’t already know that, I’m guessing!