!Computers are too big --- agk's diary 26 October 2021 @ 01:50 --- 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 (ploum@rawtext.club's "Offmini," and responses from solene @dataswamp .org, solderpunk and yargo@zaibatsu.circumlunar .space, and idiomdrottning.org.