So.
To begin.
Astrohaus have done it. With their pretty new Freewrite, they've reinvented the Tandy Model 100. And they're not the first to do so.
In the beginning, there was the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 - the Trash 100 to its fans (see pic at end). The Model 100 was the first cheap, lightweight laptop. It could store six or seven pages of text, there was a modem to transfer text with and Bill Gates (that Bill Gates) wrote the operating system, in Basic. There were a few widget style apps but unless you knew Basic, the 100 was a hardware wordprocessor. It had a tiny 8 line by 40 character screen. You could type faster than the machine could think. Tandy followed it up after a few years with an mild update: the 102. The 100/102 was so good at what it was designed to do that Tandy sold six million of them.
It was gloriously simple. I wanted one. I had to wait.
Tandy followed it up with the WP-2 (see pic at end). I did have one of those. Great machine. Much the same spec as the Trash 100 with an outstanding keyboard. Loved it. Still have it in a cupboard somewhere (in a bag with a Tandy 102 that I bought 3 years ago, just to have one).
Other companies built competitors: the Cambridge Z88, Amstrad's NC-100 and Alphasmart (see pic at end) among them. They all weighed one-two pounds (half to one kilograms, say). They all had limited connectivity, 4-12 line screens and ran for days or weeks on 2-4 AA batteries.
As a concept, I loved them. Mostly because you could write all day on them and I was spending a lot of time commuting on trains, so great battery life was far more important than your megahertz or pixel count. This was all pre mobile internet so mobile computing was a distraction free space anyway.
As processors and price improved, these simple little word processors disappeared.
Laptops got lighter and cheaper, word processors like the 100/102 disappeared. Then netbooks appeared, as did tablets. Tablets almost came full circle. A 10" iPad running WriteRoom or Notes with the keyboard displayed in landscape mode looks remarkably like a Tandy 100, which predated the iPad by around 25 years and the Freewrite by thirty.
The difference between these early Tandy laptops and tablets is the difference between focus and distraction. A Tandy 100 or an Alphasmart does pretty much one thing: text editing. An iPad does everything from text editing to painterly art to movie editing to programming to YouTube, social media and blog reading (ahem). Unless you're out of signal range and have no wifi, your opportunities to distract yourself from writing when working on a connected mobile device (and they're usually all connected) are infinite.
Now, here’s the thing. Some of us lack discipline.
Some of us just like doodling around on our phones serendipitously.
Some of us have obsessions - car reviews on YouTube, PowerPC blogs, Kardassians... Whatever.
In this environment, hard thinking suffers.
Using low distraction software, like WriteRoom, has its place. But you're always just a swipe away from Safari. Having Safari and good wifi is like Tindr for the mind of a horny singleton.
Using a aged Tandy or an Alphasmart is another option. The Alphasmart is the most flexible option as it links up and transfers text to a PC or Mac over USB as quickly as I'm describing it here. Ha! You guessed it. I have an Alphasmart in the same bag as those Tandys.
All these computers are old to ancient, although banging in text was always easy work for even the most brain dead of 8-bit computers. However, to go back to the start of this post, you can now opt for the very new Freewrite, a 21st Century Tandy 100 homage that - in the very best traditions of the Trash 100 - offers nothing but text editing and document transfer to something bigger. Mashable calls the Freewrite "pretentious hipster nonsense" but it is following closely in the tradition of some seriously legendary, cult, minimalistic tech. I like the idea of the Freewrite. I probably wouldn't buy one (that bag of word processors in the cupboard is quite full) but I like the idea. Many people like the idea.
It is pleasurable to see that people are still trying to provide a way to "just write" which suggests that people still struggle to avoid distraction. Obviously, 8-bit computers wth little storage in the 1980s and '90s were built that way because it was the cheapest way to build. I'm sure Tandy would have added wifi had it been available. The Freewrite would be more of a conscious choice, albeit an expensive one.
You can buy a Freewrite, a Tandy or an Alphasmart (and other models) on Ebay. But there are other options.
You could just use a very old Mac, like my much-blogged iBook G3, whose ability to web surf varies from limited to non-existent depending on the browser and the availability of Ethernet. Any old Mac will do, from a battered Classic onwards. Any old pre-G4 Mac can take all the text you can throw at it in a variety of mostly distraction-free writing environments - SimpleText, TextEdit, BB Edit, TextWrangler, Emacs, vi, Pico or your text weapon of choice. Newer old Macs, you know what I mean, can play trancey. soothing music on iTunes to put you in writing mood as well. And obviously, with an iBook or older PowerBook, you'll out-hipsterise anyone in Starbucks with your fine example of retro-hipster-nerddom running Mac OS 8.6 or Tiger. Live the dream, people.
So where am I with all this? I don't know. Just thinking back to the sheer fun of focussing on one thing on a Tandy WP-2 and thinking how this stuff goes round in circles and how many more times in the next thirty years I'll see the Tandy 100 reinvented by hipsters and writers desperate for fewer distractions. Give it 5-10 years and I'll get another blog post out of it, I'm sure.
Keep typing.
Links
Tandy 100/102; Alphasmart 3000 (for $19); Cambridge Z88; Freewrite
What's below? The word processor collection. Clockwise from left: an iPad, a Tandy WP-2, a Tandy 102 and an Alphasmart 3000. RIP, Tandy word processors. Best of the best.
