Retro meets Mac

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The World of Retro meets Mac

 

This is the first post I've tried writing on the AlphaSmart 3000, which is a hell of a name for anything. The keyboard is full-size and quite clicky, so the typing experience is probably better than on the MacBook, which has the usual chiclet keys, which don't offer a great deal of feedback. The style of this thing is straight out of the Apple playbook from the era of the very first iMacs - it's even in one of the translucent colourways of the second generation of those machines; I would guess, although I don't actually remember, that the AlphaSmart was aimed principally at a Mac-based audience.

So far so good: the MacBook is off having a cool down, so my notifications are limited to my phone, which I tend to ignore anyway until I've finished what I'm currently doing. We'll see how this works out as a methodology, but it definitely has the appeal of simplicity and focus about it - this particular machine does have a calculator applet built in but apart from that it's typing only. The display being restricted to four lines of scrolling text is a refreshingly retro experience, too; it should encourage just bashing out the words without worrying too much about the shape of the piece until the edit down on the MacBook.

Right - time to try and connect it to the Mac. While that's booting up, it's worth reflecting on just that: boot time. This comes pretty much straight up to your last piece of work as soon as you push the on button and has the added neat trick of autosaving as you go and having none-volatile memory, so you don't lose everything during battery changes. Three AA's are good for over seven hundred hours, so the availability of a mains adaptor input is almost irrelevant.

Right - back on the MacBook now, having seen the text magically being typed in WriteRoom as the Alpha sends the text down USB at the push of a single 'Send' key and using what looks to be keyboard emulation. It lost half a sentence somewhere in the serial stream, but what the heck. Pretty pleased that something so old and so ridiculously cheap turns out to be a useful piece of kit.

More retro nonsense to come in future posts.

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