!Computers are too big
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agk's diary
26 October 2021 @ 01:50
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written on Pinebook Pro
in the kitchen
---
I saw a lime-green OLPC XO-1 and a beautiful tiny
Olivetti typewriter in a museum in Charlotte, North
Carolina, USA. OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) was a bad
try at appropriate tech: rugged little lime-green
energy-efficient machines with mesh networking and
sunlight-readable displays, sold at a quarter the
price of a new netbook.
The idea was charities or governments would buy them
like BBC Micros (the 1980s British computer of the
people).[^1] Africa would become wired, wireless,
whatever. Without the ability to maintain and repair
them with in-country components, among other problems,
no country wanted to waste limited national budgets on
machines guaranteed to rapidly become ewaste.
The tiny Olivetti is entrancing, prettier than photos
convey. The OLPC is just bad-small. Getting-cramps-in-
my-adult-hands-looking-at-the-undersized-chicklet-key-
board small. Would-80-columns-even-fit-on-that-display
small. Africa got wired (or wireless) without OLPC's
help. Feature phones and low-end Androids became the
computers of the people. Not general-purpose, easily
maintainable, or repairable, but computers and cheap.
The Olivetti is a portable machine for writing. It
increased conviviality. Letters typed on it went to
friends and associates; memos crossed offices and seas;
copy became newspapers; poems, essays, and manuscripts
reached journals and publishers. Rants became 'zines
and newsletters. Emotions and ideas took durable form.
The machine was durable, too. In 1982 or '83 as the
BBC Micro was reaching British schoolchildren, William
Gibson wrote *Neuromancer* on a 1937 Hermes typewriter.
On a cheap half-century old machine, he invented cyber-
space: "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by
billions...in every nation." Today's computers of the
people are expensive fragile cyberspace viewers.
Forty years after Gibson's *Neuromancer,* there's no
modern Hermes. I think a modern machine for writing
would be a ubiquitous, cheap, durable 80 x 24 char-
acter terminal with a good keyboard and the battery
life of a graphing calculator. It could run autono-
mously, or network and use server resources.
Palmtops from the late '80s come close. They still
boot up, but displays weren't quite 80 columns.
Networking them is hard. The operating systems
aren't maintained. It'd be so cool if you could rip
out a Psion's guts and stick in a $5 Raspberry Pi
Zero W, one from the future with a USB-C port.
I swear a cheap, tough pocket terminal must exist
somewhere---on Tindie, hobbyist or modding forums,
crowdsupply, or eBay. Maybe it's a GPD Win 1? No:
feels good in the hand but expensive, overpowered,
complicated, finicky about turning on. Prototype Pi
palmtops by n-o-d-e.net, Ben Heck of element14, and
Nathan Morgan of parts-people.org stayed prototypes.
Screens on Windows Mobile and Palm devices are the
wrong way to display 80 x 24 characters.
A girl can dream of a plastic clamshell rugged as
a 3DS, netbook, or Smart Response XE. Low-power b/w
reflective LCD with 80 x 24 characters readable in
full sun. Keys click like Blackberry Bold's. Well-
placed Ctrl, Esc, and arrow keys. Good power-manage-
ment. Well-documented, repairable with limited tools
by amateur artisans. Built for casual adaptation as
network protocols, RAM, storage, and CPUs change.
With the lowest clockspeed and RAM that'll run
OpenBSD or embedded linux, tmux, and SSH over wired
and wireless networks. With support for Varvara on
a Uxn stack-machine, Inferno, and Plan 9 drawterm.
Purpose-built devices make terminal applications
accessible. Need a distraction-free writer? Browse
directories with nnn, compose with micro or wordstar,
sync with rsync or git, print with lpr. A good manual
matters. Remote classroom? Ssh to a unix or plan9
server for mail, messaging, gopher, www, storage,
bulletin boards, and programs required for homework.
Listen to lectures on internet radio. Chat or call
to ask questions. Timed exams and realtime text
slideshows probably aren't hard to make. Stay in
touch with relays like soprani.ca that pass xmpp
messages to SMS and other messaging systems.
A girl can dream of:
* stuff that's hard to break, easy to use, easy to
ignore, and easy to maintain or fix.
* participating in a community of like minds over
vast distances on a future low-bandwidth, fault-
tolerant p2p distributed document database with
her electricity-sipping tiny terminal.[^2]
* occasionally jacking into local or remote nets
via datalink or sneakernet transfer device to
sync state---and do something realtime if band-
width allows.
* sending text and bitmaps to her friend's jack-
hammering daisywheel or old 80mm thermal printer,
making 'zines and books in 30 years with a cheap
old cyberpunk typewriter.
---
[1]: The BBC chose its computer of the people on good
criteria: "We didn't want people to be controll-
ed by it, but to control it" (oldcomputers.net/
bbc-micro.html). The film Micro Men (2009) drama-
tizes how it came to be.
[2]: Low-bandwidth distributed social computing
thrives on sdf's plan 9 system. P2p, offline-
first distributed document databases are being
developed by earthstar project, matrix.org,
via git-annex, syncthing, and kiwix---and via
ideas on gopher and gemini (
[email protected]'s
"Offmini," and responses from solene @dataswamp
.org, solderpunk and
[email protected]
.space, and idiomdrottning.org.
