A Brief History Of AlphaSmart

There are a handful of gadgets that do one thing so well that they become cult classics long after the company that made them has moved on or closed up shop. [This Does Not Compute] takes us throug…

Wandering Through Old Word Processors Yields A Beast

The world once ran on hardcopy, and when the digital age started to bring new tools and ways of doing things, documents were ripe for change. Today, word processors and digital documents are so ubi…

A Typewriter For The Paperless Age

Writing is, as any of the Hackaday crew will tell you, a task which requires concentration. For your best work there’s a need to be in that elusive Zone, and for some that means making the ex…

Playdate Handheld Turned Typewriter

The Playdate is an interesting gaming system. It’s a handheld, has a black and white screen, and superficially reminds us a little bit of the original Game Boy, right down to the button layou…

The NES Gets Its Own OS

Until recently, most video game systems didn’t need their own operating systems in order to play games. Especially in the cartridge era — the games themselves simply ran directly on the…