AlphaSmart
A classroom writing machine that writers took over.
Two former Apple engineers and one of their brothers founded AlphaSmart in 1992 and shipped the first one in August 1993. It was a keyboard with a four-line screen and a memory, sold to schools that couldn’t afford a computer lab, on the twin promises of being cheap and being hard to break. At first it only talked to Macs and the Apple IIGS, over the Apple Desktop Bus.
The Canon Cat wanted to be your whole computer. The AlphaSmart declines to be one at all.
Send
There is no file format here and no sync. You plug the thing into a computer, put the cursor where you want the words, and press Send. The AlphaSmart pretends to be a keyboard and types your draft in, character by character, into whatever happens to be focused. A word processor, a browser field, a mail window. It doesn’t know and it doesn’t care.
It’s slow enough to sit and watch. It’s also close to unbreakable, because the only thing it depends on is the far machine knowing what a keyboard is. No driver, no format, no company that has to still exist.
The rest is just as plain. Eight files, one per button along the top row where the function keys usually go, about twenty-five pages each. Saving isn’t a command; the text is simply always saved. The Neo 2, the last model, runs roughly 700 hours on three AA batteries, which for most people is one change a year.
Renaissance Learning bought the company in 2005 and stopped making them in September 2013. The machines kept working, and the audience changed underneath them: built for twelve-year-olds, now hunted on eBay by novelists who want something that cannot open a browser. It was never designed to protect anybody’s attention. That was a side effect of building down to a price for a school district, and thirty years on it’s the reason people go looking for one.