Snippet: Thord’s Screens ☇

Thord Daniel Hedengren reminded me that the AlphaSmart was once a thing:

I’ve recently added another screen to the arsenal. Behind it is probably the least capable computer I’ve ever owned, but it doesn’t matter because the screen is great for its purpose. The screen is LCD and for most purposes it shows four lines of text, no graphics, although I can change the system settings to squeeze out six lines. I don’t like that though, it’s too hard to read with the low resolution and the fact that the text has no padding whatsoever, thus almost touching the plastic casing. This little thing is a dumb keyboard computer called NEO, made by Alphasmart back in 2006 or something. I found it at a flea market for next to nothing. It does one thing and one thing well: It lets me write outdoors, because LCD performs fairly well in direct sunlight, and excellent in the shade. Add to that the supposedly 700 hour long battery life of this thing on three AA batteries, and you’ve got an outdoors typewriter right there. In fact, this is fairly close to the e-ink typewriter I’ve been dreaming of.

I remember these, but feel like most disappeared around the mid-aughts.