RETRO COMPUTING? (Posted 2006-06-04 13:08:23 by Ray Lopez) Back in 1986, I purchased what at that time was an absolutely wonderful, modern, and advanced piece of computer hardware: a Tandy TRS-80 Model 102. The thing was nothing more than a small box with a wonderful, full-size keyboard and a small LCD screen. It did a few things very well, one of which was to allow me to write unimpeded. I used it for all my college school work, and used it up until around 1989 or so, when I was seduced by more features and a whopping 20 MB hard drive on yet another Tandy laptop. I sold the 102 at around that time, and have since been on the fast-track of looking for more and more features packed into a smaller and smaller hardware footprint. Lately I've been lamenting the fact that I wish I could be as productive on my trusty Thinkpad T40 as I was on my old Tandy 102. I used to sit for HOURS typing away on my 102, easily churning out 1000, 2000 words at a sitting. Why can't I do the same thing on my T40? The answer is obvious: DISTRACTIONS! Computers are so loaded up with distractions (email, surfing, IM, music, movies, etc) that it is quite difficult to get a solid set of time to get any work done, especially for someone like me, whose attention span has been honed to about 7 minutes per task as a result of watching too many Warner Bros. cartoons. All of these lamentations about my easy distractability and diminishing productivity led me to think about my old 102. So I went and googled the 102 and it turns out (not surprisingly) that there is a vibrant user base of 102 users out there, and there's even a guy selling gently used 102s. I looked at the current FAQ for using the 102 with modern OSs and it turns out that getting text to and from a computer running Windows (or in my case, Linux) would be a major hassle. I'm really beyond the stage in my life where getting things to work is fun, because I have so little time nowadays. I just want stuff to work. So I decided against plunking down money for a 102. But still, I figured that I was not the only person in the world looking for a simple computing device that could do a few things very well, so with a bit of further googling, I landed upon the homepage of a company called Alphasmart [ http://www.alphasmart.com ]. Lo and behold, my prayers were answered, for Alphasmart sells a device called the Neo, which is very reminiscent of my old 102! More googling on the Neo and reading different people's reviews convinced me that I had struck gold. This device is supposed to be very well made, have a fantastic keyboard, and basically just provide a way to WRITE. It has a barebones word processor, and a very simple way to move text from the Neo to a PC or Mac. The best part about it, of course, is that this is all the thing does! No more writing for 1 to 10 minutes, then getting a new email, IM, or deciding to see if I can do more online "research" googling for something. Furthermore, there is no time wasted booting up, dealing with crashes, viruses, etc. Just turn the thing on, and it goes right to where you left off. I know that most people out there are not as feeble and weakminded as I am, and that you can get work done over long stretches of time on your laptops, but for me this device represents a much more productive way to work. I read on a discussion forum that the Neo is backordered, so it may be a while before I receive it in the mail. But I'm looking forward to it, even to writing some blog posts from it. I am hopeful that my journey back in time to the simpler days of my Tandy Model 102 will help me to be more productive in my day-to-day work and other writing projects. -------- There are no comments on this post. To submit a comment on this post, email rl@well.com or visit us on the web [ http://ratthing.com ].