I've been thinking about getting myself an electronic typewriter and MITM the keyboard to turn it into a into a serial terminal. I can't afford a proper ASR-33, so I'll have to make it work with what I got.
I'd previously built a parallel port for the Ace on veroboard from TTL logic, based on a design a friend of mine came up with for his ZX Spectrum, so I could use the Ace to ride around on a micromouse. To drive the ASR-33, I had a 24v smoothed power supply that I'd scavenged from a skip when my mother's employer had scrapped some prototype ATMs (cash dispensers), so I wired that up to give +/- 12V and switched that from one line on the parallel board using some power transistors desoldered from the ATM. Then I wrote code to bit-bang 110baud RS232 in Forth on the Ace. It took a lot of trial and error, as there wasn't exactly a lot of documentation available in the town library, but I got there in the end.
I'm not sure if I was the only person who ever had a printer connected to a Jupiter Ace, but I'm pretty sure I was the only person to print Ace code listings to an ASR-33. I wish I still had that ASR-33 but somewhere along the way my parents decided they were fed up with storing all my junk, asked what I wanted saving, and I didn't think to save that.
Email comes in -> prints to receipt printer -> I type up the response via electronic typewriter -> hit scan on my scanner -> sent a response -> confirmation printed on receipt printer.
PoC worked well.
Right now I am building out how to correlate what I scan to who it is supposed to respond to. So I working on some GPT magic to do that. Also since I am using OCR I don't have a way verify that the final content of the email after OCR.
So still a work in progress and not something I am using day to day.
More modern (90s) electronic typewriters with a screen (I guess you would call them word processors) could be a better way... But I like the click clack of each key stroke.
May I ask what you are using to interface with your email client and what scanner do you use?
If one could afford a proper ASR-33 then where could one find one?
Asking for a friend. Watchlist on Ebay hasn’t produced anything in years.