Many moons ago I worked with some children classified as illiterate. Their reading and writing skills remained almost non-existent. One of the things I used back in those days to practice keyboarding and text skills was a wonderful little product called the AlphaSmart.
It was not a laptop or a tablet. This was before tablets were a thing and laptops were typically expensive. It was before Chromebooks, too. It was a keyboard with a thin, monochrome LED window that showed the text typed in, and nothing else. It ran on AA batteries, which seemed to last forever thanks to that minimal screen.
The devices were very durable. They could be dropped without consequences, usually. And this was a key selling point for the education market, which bought them by the metric ton.
The text generated on that keyboard was saved automatically. If you wanted to see it, or print it, or edit it, or format it in any way, you had to transfer the file to something else. But to type it in, all you needed was the AlphaSmart. With a PS/2 port, (later USB), users could simply plug their model in and transfer the text over to a computer.
The company was bought out in 2005. Their last and greatest model, the Neo 2, ceased production in 2013 after the aforementioned tablets and Chromebooks displaced them as the inexpensive computing products favored by schools.
But somewhere along the line, a funny thing happened. The Neo and other AlphaSmart products gained a loyal following of adults who appreciated the clutter-free means of writing that the little keyboards offered. Some authors swear by them, and snatch up used AlphaSmarts on eBay for $20 or so, keeping a ready supply in case one of their existing models breaks.
A company called Freewrite introduced a new distraction-free writing tool last summer. A buddy sent me their info recently and it brought back decades-old memories of using AlphaSmarts with low-literacy kids. In fact, Freewrite has purchased the domain alphasmart.com, and it now forwards over to their site, getfreewrite.com/products.alpha. The Freewrite Alpha looks like a sleek, modernized version of the old AlphaSmart, for about the price of a robust tablet.
Personally, I’m happy with Word and I’ve always enjoyed having a toolbar onscreen for formatting. I was never a big fan of memorizing keyboard shortcuts, as WordPerfect used to require for extensive formatting. In my opinion, Microsoft won the word processing wars with their toolbar back in the day.
However, some authors swear by the distraction-free word processing experience offered by the old AlphaSmart and similar products. Now that a company has revived that concept, perhaps those fans won’t have to scour eBay for used word processors anymore.
Apocalypse Code, the sixth novel in the Star League Assassins series, is set for release on Dec. 25th. This series has been on pause a couple years, and more than a few people have been waiting for it to pick back up again. Now’s your chance to pre-order and have it appear on your Kindle first thing Christmas morning.
Wow! I had never heard of the keyboard with a small screen in it, Jaxon. At least I don’t remember. How wonderful you had it to teach the illiterate. I have seen the new typewriter type of keyboards though. Thank you for sharing a lovely scene of your past.
I had preordered APOCALYPSE CODE #6. Thank you, Jaxon!