There was a time when the line between typewriters and word processing software was a bit fuzzy. [Poking Technology] found a Xerox 6040 which can’t decide what it is. It looks like a typewriter but has a monitor and a floppy drive, along with some extra buttons. You can watch him tear it down in the video below.
The old device uses a daisywheel type element, which, back then, was state of the art. A wheel had many spokes with letters and the printer would spin the wheel and then strike the plastic spoke.
The art of writing has become a cluttered one to follow, typically these days through a graphical word processor. There may be a virtual page in front of you, but it’s encumbered by much UI annoyance. To combat this a variety of distraction free software and appliances have been created over the years.
The zip file, in the releases section of the repository, is based upon SvarDOS, and comes with some software we well remember from back in the day. There’s MS Word 5.5 for DOS, in the public domain since it was released as a Y2K fix, Arnor Protext, and the venerable AsEasyAs spreadsheet alongside a few we’re less familiar with. He makes the point that a machine with a BIOS is required, but those of you unwilling to enable BIOS emulation on a newer machine should be able to run it in a VM or an emulator. Perhaps it’s one to take on the road with us, and bang away in DOS alongside all the high-powered executives on the train with their fancy business projections.
We recently talked about SvarDOS, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our article linked to a piece [Liam] wrote for The Register.
There are a handful of gadgets that do one thing so well that they become cult classics long after the company that made them has moved on or closed up shop. [This Does Not Compute] takes us through the history of the AlphaSmart word processor which started as an educational tool, but finds itself in many a writer’s bag today.
The original AlphaSmart bears more than a passing resemblance to its Apple contemporaries since the company was founded by two Apple engineers. The Cupertino company didn’t see the value in the concept, but didn’t lean on any non-competes to keep the pair from pursuing the idea on their own time either. What resulted was a dead simple word processor that could be had for 1/5 of what a new computer typically cost in the era, which was particularly attractive for the target market of schools.
After several successful years, the pressure of PDAs and then smartphones from one side and cheaper laptops from the other meant school districts no longer wanted single-purpose devices when they could have a fully-fledged computing experience for students. We wonder if that was the right call, with so many now wanting distraction-free devices, but it was the end of the road for the company either way.
Our own [Kristina Panos] and [Tom Nardi] have shown us the guts of the Neo and of one of its competitors, the Writer, respectively. If you have a Neo of your own in need of replacement keycaps, you can print them.
The world once ran on hardcopy, and when the digital age started to bring new tools and ways of doing things, documents were ripe for change. Today, word processors and digital documents are so ubiquitous that they are hardly worth a thought, but that didn’t happen all at once. [Cathode Ray Dude] has a soft spot for old word processors and the journey they took over decades, and he walks through the Olivetti ETV 2700.
In the days of character displays and no multitasking, WYSIWYG as a concept was still a long ways off.
The ETV 2700 is a monstrous machine; a fusion of old-school word processor, x86-based hardware, and electric 17 inch-wide typewriter.
With it one could boot up a word processor that is nothing like the WYSIWYG of today, write and edit a document, and upon command, the typewriter portion could electronically type out a page. A bit like a printer, but it really is an electric typewriter with a computer interface. Characters were hammered out one at a time with daisy wheel and ink ribbon on a manually-loaded page using all the usual typewriter controls.
While internally the machine has an x86 processor, expects a monitor and even boots MS-DOS, the keyboard had its own layout (and even proprietary keys and functions), did not support graphical output, and in other ways was unusual even by the standards of the oddball decades during which designers and products experimented with figuring out what worked best in terms of functionality and usability.
Writing is, as any of the Hackaday crew will tell you, a task which requires concentration. For your best work there’s a need to be in that elusive Zone, and for some that means making the experience as distraction free as possible. For them there’s an entire class of minimalist word-processors and text editors which reduce the UI to nothing more than the text. [Adam Blumenberg] has taken this a step beyond software with his digital typewriter, a single-purpose Raspberry Pi-based cyberdeck that serves only for distraction-free writing.
There’s not a lot in the way of descriptive text at the above link but in a way there doesn’t need to be as the photographs tell the story. A mechanical keyboard and a wide but not very tall display fit with the Pi in a fairly rudimentary wooden case, and running Focuswriter it leaves very little in the way of distraction. In that sense it’s not quite so much a cyberdeck in its application as something more like the smart digital typewriters from a few decades ago without the printer, but we can see that it makes for a very handy writing implement. Sadly the job of writing for Hackaday requires constant access to online sources on a larger screen, or we’d be tempted to try one ourselves.
The Playdate is an interesting gaming system. It’s a handheld, has a black and white screen, and superficially reminds us a little bit of the original Game Boy, right down to the button layout. But the fact that it has a second controller that pops out of the side, that this controller is a crank, and that the whole system was made by the same people that made Untitled Goose Game, makes us quite intrigued. Apparently it has made an impact on others, too, because this project turns the gaming system into a typewriter.
The Playdate doesn’t have native support for USB accessories unless it’s plugged into this custom 3D printed dock. Inside of the dock is a Teensy 4.1 which handles some translation between the keyboard and the console. Once the dock is taken care of the text editor needs to be side-loaded to the device as well. The word processor has the ability to move the cursor around, insert and delete text, and the project’s creator, [t0mg], plans to add more features in future versions like support for multiple files, changing the font, and a few other things as well.
For anyone interested in recreating this project, all of the printable files, the text editor, and the schematics are all available in the GitHub repo. It’s an impressive project for a less well-known console that we haven’t seen many other hacks for, unless you count this one-off Arduboy project which took some major inspiration from the Playdate’s crank controller.
Until recently, most video game systems didn’t need their own operating systems in order to play games. Especially in the cartridge era — the games themselves simply ran directly on the hardware and didn’t require the middleman of an operating system for any of the functionality of the consoles. There were exceptions for computers that doubled as home computers such as the Commodore, but systems like the NES never had their own dedicated OS. At least, until [Inkbox] designed and built the NES-OS.
The operating system does not have any command line, instead going directly for a graphical user interface. There are two programs that make up the operating system. The first is a settings application which allows the user to make various changes to the appearance and behavior of the OS, and the second is a word processor with support for the Japanese “Family Keyboard” accessory. The memory on the NES is limited, and since the OS loads entirely into RAM there’s only enough leftover space for eight total files. Those files themselves are limited to 832 bytes, which is one screen’s worth of text without scrolling.
While it might seem limited to those of us living in the modern era, the OS makes nearly complete use of the available processing power and memory of this 1980s system that was best known for Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. It’s an impressive build for such a small package, and really dives into a lot of the hardware and limitations when building software for these systems. If you need more functionality than that, we’d recommend installing Linux on the NES Classic instead.
