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Comment by zelos | Hacker News Reader

My dad used a Tandy Dreamwriter for many years to write on while working as a travel journalist, well into the 2000's.

Small, Z80 based, with a few lines of text on the screen and powered by AA batteries. Other journalists used to laugh at the 'old guy with the Fisher Price computer', but the instant-on and distraction free typing was a definite advantage. Pretty nice not having to worry about a fragile, expensive laptop while out in the jungle or whatever, too.

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In the early 1990s I got to shoot some NCAA Div 1 basketball. Some reporters that showed up and worked from the press room often had these old TRS80 "Slab portables". They're hard to describe, but a 2 inch thick open-face notebook coputer, with a real keyboard and a small black and white screen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

Our students reporters had to take notes on paper.

In the early 90s dedicated word processing machines seemed to be pretty popular and writing papers with small lcd screens was common.

Oh cool. The Dreamwriter was based on the Amstrad NC100:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_NC100

A very cool little device, at the time. I borrowed one as a kid and it seemed very exciting to be able to type things wherever I was.

I'm kinda nostalgic for that less connected era, where life moved at a slightly slower pace. Like all nostalgia, I'm leaving out the bad parts.

You make the link unclickable when you format it as code.

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