The very first writing machine I ever bought myself was a Sharp Intelliwriter 2000. It had 4K of memory, which I spent nearly $1000 bulking out to 16 K. It also had a tiny, tiny screen. I think maybe 64 characters at most. Enough for maybe half a sentence - if you kept your sentences shorter than this one.
It was incredibly limited but still a step up from the electric typewriter I’d been using. The very first piece I was ever paid for, I wrote on that thing. The next couple as well, before I ploughed the money earned into a PC and a dot matrix printer.
That was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. It was a wonder to me to flick through Wired magazine and find something not too far removed from it being reviewed recently.
This bad boy.
The Freewrite Alpha.
The keyboard looks nicer, and the screen is slightly bigger. But still not much, eh? The Wired review kicks off:
FOUR BLANK LINES and a cursor. After getting through the setup pleasantries, that's all you're left with when you start a new draft on the Freewrite Alpha.
No spell check, no AI-powered notes on your grammar, and most certainly no other browser tabs to distract you from the ultimate goal of getting words down on the page.
The idea is romantic, I guess. It's just you and your words. And it definitely speaks to whatever dark animus is gathering in our culture against tech that gets bigger and more powerful with every iteration. The dumb phone movement and single-purpose digital notepads come to mind as other examples of the same thing—an urgent need to focus.
I don’t think I could do it, though. I’m so used to working in a vast multiscreen arena of words, story arcs, characters, research, and… stuff… that being confronted by just four lines of text again would bring me undone.
Perhaps literary writers who tend to dial right in on the single line they’re crafting might get some use for it… but I dunno.
It’s pretty obviously a pure creation machine rather than being optimised for review and rewriting. When you’ve got a draft you're happy with, you send it somewhere else to clean up.
While the Google Drive syncing was handy for me, the Freewrite also has a button I couldn't stop myself using: Send. This immediately sends your draft as a text file and PDF to the email linked to your Freewrite account, and nothing has ever felt more like ripping a sheet of paper out of a typewriter to me than hitting it at the end of a piece, that "Send" whipping it away from me.
In reality, pressing Send only beckoned the next step, an editing pass, but with this sort of product there is a lot to be said for the emotional weight of a design decision, and I fell in love with that Send button.
Still, that move through to the edit was also a step that the Alpha made more of a requirement than I'm used to. Every writer likes to imagine their copy comes out clean, and the rise of autocorrect has made that a lower bar than ever to clear.
Well, the Alpha has no crutches of that sort, so almost every draft I checked was riddled with little typos and words without spaces between them. On an actual computer, using an actual web browser, clicking through these to fix them was generally a momentary job, but it still leaves me wondering how an 80,000-word document might look when reviewed for the first time.
I dunno if it's just me, but the rise of tech companies pushing these single function devices in order to allow people to focus seems a bit offensive when it's tech companies that have created this "SQUIRREL!" distraction hellscape we're all trying to navigate.
It feels very much like being sold a solution to an issue that the people selling you the solution created in the first place.
Not for me. I like a whole page (vertically) too, but that keyboard has no ESC and CTRL is eroneously spelled "caps lock" (lower case: clearly hipster). And what do PG UP and PG DN do? Move four lines up or down?
I printed my undergrad thesis on an Epson dot matrix printer (9-pin). Stayed up until seven in the morning it was due, feeding it cut sheets of paper. OMG those things were slow (especially when doing multiple passes to build up fancy fonts and equations).
And am I the only one who referrs to "autocorrect" as "autocorrupt"? Definitely a perjorative.
And here I am trying to organise my already oversized and overfilled desk at home to fit in a third large curved monitor so I can really capture that sitting on the bridge of my own starship feel.
This feels like a product looking for a market rather than something that was needed or asked for.
I remember reading an article (perhaps in Byte?) many years ago with an early example that was supposed to be a document-centric computer. No GUI as such, but a screen that could do high-resolution proportional typefaces and special keys on and around the keyboard for doing most of the sorts of document filing and searching functions that go with text editing. Perhaps it was an article about Jeff Raskin's machine that became the Canon Cat? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat).
Also of note in the "alternate word-processor reality" realm is probably the Psion Series 5, an English thing that I never met in person but it always seemed kind of cool (pre-web of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5
See also Archy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) which the interwebs say is a software follow-on of Raskin's "Humane User Interface" ideas. Never used it, but the principle of embedded editable objects has been tried over and over (Microsoft OLE and Office is a prime but seemingly never quite working example) and just never seems to stick. Probably hard to do without the task-specific affordances of individual applications suited to the data they're working on.
Look I realise that great works have been writing on these 'simpler' machines, Enheduanna probably wrote incredible poetry on clay tablets doesn't mean if you write on clay tablets you will be a great poet. The more stuff I see like this more I think all these people see marketing, trying to sell you an idea of you. Cut out the middle person and spend the time and resources working out who you are regardless of the teck. But one caveat I am reader, not a writer, maybe this is just what you need/want.
Unless it can also fix my predisposition to being easily distracted by the inane it’s not going to help. Coupled with chronic immaturity it’s the double whammy
I dunno if it's just me, but the rise of tech companies pushing these single function devices in order to allow people to focus seems a bit offensive when it's tech companies that have created this "SQUIRREL!" distraction hellscape we're all trying to navigate.
It feels very much like being sold a solution to an issue that the people selling you the solution created in the first place.
Not for me. I like a whole page (vertically) too, but that keyboard has no ESC and CTRL is eroneously spelled "caps lock" (lower case: clearly hipster). And what do PG UP and PG DN do? Move four lines up or down?
I printed my undergrad thesis on an Epson dot matrix printer (9-pin). Stayed up until seven in the morning it was due, feeding it cut sheets of paper. OMG those things were slow (especially when doing multiple passes to build up fancy fonts and equations).
And am I the only one who referrs to "autocorrect" as "autocorrupt"? Definitely a perjorative.
well I will be calling it autocorrupt now.
Same. It's now canon
And here I am trying to organise my already oversized and overfilled desk at home to fit in a third large curved monitor so I can really capture that sitting on the bridge of my own starship feel.
This feels like a product looking for a market rather than something that was needed or asked for.
These sorts of thing (the "focused computer" if you like) have a pretty long history. There's even a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_appliance
I remember reading an article (perhaps in Byte?) many years ago with an early example that was supposed to be a document-centric computer. No GUI as such, but a screen that could do high-resolution proportional typefaces and special keys on and around the keyboard for doing most of the sorts of document filing and searching functions that go with text editing. Perhaps it was an article about Jeff Raskin's machine that became the Canon Cat? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat).
Also of note in the "alternate word-processor reality" realm is probably the Psion Series 5, an English thing that I never met in person but it always seemed kind of cool (pre-web of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5
See also Archy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) which the interwebs say is a software follow-on of Raskin's "Humane User Interface" ideas. Never used it, but the principle of embedded editable objects has been tried over and over (Microsoft OLE and Office is a prime but seemingly never quite working example) and just never seems to stick. Probably hard to do without the task-specific affordances of individual applications suited to the data they're working on.
Look I realise that great works have been writing on these 'simpler' machines, Enheduanna probably wrote incredible poetry on clay tablets doesn't mean if you write on clay tablets you will be a great poet. The more stuff I see like this more I think all these people see marketing, trying to sell you an idea of you. Cut out the middle person and spend the time and resources working out who you are regardless of the teck. But one caveat I am reader, not a writer, maybe this is just what you need/want.
Who would have predicted that, for many people in this technologically advanced age, most of their typing would be done by their thumbs?
i.e. the technique that has evolved to be preferred for phone typing.
I can't even read a book these days without having a computer handy to check random tidbits I discover, or cool new word usage, etc, etc.
This looks like a Listen 'n' Learn (or whatever those things were called) from back in the day.
Unless it can also fix my predisposition to being easily distracted by the inane it’s not going to help. Coupled with chronic immaturity it’s the double whammy
Yeah, not for me. I like to look at a whole page. Besides, I'm not a "million tabs open" guy- I try to do one thing at a time.
Dot matrix is going back a bit though I still have some print outs.