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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a worthy read because it looks a computing product from a user's perspective instead of a engineer or an MBA. Multi-function everything devices with the addictive potential of nicotine may be engineering marvels and business rockstars, but this person wanted to write without distraction and needed to reach into the past to find a product that met their needs.

And it's a fun exercise to take this user's need and whiteboard out a new product for them. How are those ergonomics; could we hinge the display or project it somehow in a way that will let them type longer without discomfort? How's that LCD's readability; would eink be better? Should the device be doing incremental backups to the cloud? Should it offer dictation?

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Should the device be doing incremental backups to the cloud?

I think one of the key features would be no network connection.

So a Linux machine (like an old laptop) booted into single-user mode seems like a good approach here. Single shell, single application at a time, no GUI.

I have an old Linux laptop (an old iBook G4) that boots into a non graphical environment and starts emacs in text mode on login with no network connectivity by default.

It's my go-to for focus.

This is so good. Can you please share how it can be done?

But it won't run for 700 hours on 3 AA batteries.

The console unfortunately has a very limited character set. Perhaps using fbterm or a newer equivalent.

What kind of prose are you writing if your language's default character set doesn't suffice?

Asian, two langs, bullets, etc. utf8 is the bare minimum for a product in the modern world.

This misses the simplicity though, right? $35 and this device arrives ready to record typing and goes 500h+ between charges. I have one of these. The keyboard is also surprisingly good, as in good enough that it also won't be a reason you can't be smashing out prose. I honestly think a "modern" version of this could be exactly this and there would still be a market.

Networking is fine, as long as it has no browser.

exactly. the pitfall of this thing is that it stores everything in RAM and it is more than possible (I've seen it many, many, many times) to lose everything in a blink if the batteries die and the internal backup battery is dead or bad.

The send button is really cool. It turns it into an HID device and spews a stream of characters out over USB. It would be pretty easy and pretty cool to make a tiny little usb device that can accept that stream every time you hit 'SEND' and append it to a file on a... more robust system.

On the topic of improving the experience, this sounds like a good opportunity for using something like 3D XPoint as the the primary / only form of RAM on the hypothetical successor.

One of the key features is no way for user-driven internet interactions. Backing up data in the background doesn't have to let me hop on hacker news.

The real key feature is the lack of access to the Internet. Having a connection just for backup etc wouldn't really break the single task machine benefits.

As long as you can't use it to get distracted, it wouldn't matter at all, though the setup and battery draw of such a connection might impact the user experience negatively.

Maybe BTLE and an app on your phone for sync/backup would be an option? If I were using such a gadget, I'd really appreciate unobtrusive and just-works-ish features to make sure I don't lose what I've written.

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