The pleasures of Old Distraction Free Tech

Posted by Andrew Denner on August 16, 2021 · 2 mins read

I have written about my love of Alphasmarts before. The first draft of this blog post is being written on a Neo. (For those who have not had the pleasure, it is one of the later Alphasmarts and is rather advanced with a USB port.)

The world of Unix has a philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”, in this case, The Neo can process words, and do a little bit of spell checking. There are no distractions from discord or Facebook. No notifications or any temptations to go to Reddit. In fact, you don’t even have to worry about running out of batteries. It is powered by a stack of 3 AA Batteries that will last for years. That and it’s designed for elementary school students bulletproofness means that it can travel anywhere without fear of damage. I am currently writing this at our campsite for the night at a picnic table. After I return home I will connect it to my computer via USB and hit send. The amazing thing is it will then emulate a keyboard and rapidly dump the text as if a demonic keyboardist rapidly typed it all out. No drivers, nothing needed to be installed. At the end almost magic.

The temptation in tech is to always be all things to everyone. Add that extra feature that the one important person is asking for. Scope creep is a major thing second only to imposter syndrome. I often have to try hard to remember if you are solving that 80% of your user base well, it is where your efforts should be spent. In the end, you can always add that extra special request to the bottom of the backlog just to placate that one user, right next to “world peace”.