
A Prisoner’s Only Writing Machine - happy-go-lucky
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-one-of-the-last-american-typewriter-companies-survives
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jccalhoun
Am I missing something or is there no actual picture of the typewriter that is
the whole point of the article? [http://www.swintec.com/clear-
typewriters/242-2416dm-7k-cc-ne...](http://www.swintec.com/clear-
typewriters/242-2416dm-7k-cc-new-york.html)

~~~
ceautery
A cut and paste from that link:

"Memory sizes greater than those permitted in any spefific correctional
facilitywill be rejected at the facility property room."

It's equally bleak that our prisons mandate typewriter memory maximums, and
that the company filling that need doesn't care enough about its market to
give their advertising copy a basic proofread.

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microsage
This would be a great product for a non-profit to improve on. Some of the
restrictions (only 7k characters stored, consumption of expensive resources
like paper, ink ribbons, correction tape, etc) could be fairly easily and
cheaply fixed by making a dedicated word processing machine instead of a
typewriter out of something along the lines of a raspberry pi and a cheap low
res display. Assuming there's a way to print from USB in prisons, or access to
computers with email periodically (big assumptions that I haven't verified
beyond what I've seen in popular media) this could provide an affordable
lifeline to a lot of people.

~~~
paulmd
This is a fantastic idea.

I've been mentally designing this idea for literally a decade now, just about
exactly. I actually think it can be made quite better than that, at a lower
cost. And I think similar to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, public sales could
fund philanthropy in a very critical and under-served area. Give it away free
as much as possible, otherwise get it into commissaries as cheaply as possible
(and lock them down with sales agreements to prevent them from overpricing).

I was really into classic computers as a kid, and one that always fascinated
me was the TRS-80 Model 100. It's your basic dumb Z80 computer: it has a 8x40
character display, a keyboard, and... that's it. What made it distinctive is
the >20-hour battery life on 4xAA batteries, which is just absurd and still
has yet to be matched today. It's minimal and good at what it does - edit
text. It edits text. For a really long time, on easy-to-replace batteries.

Well, surely we can do better today? I want the minimum possible programming
terminal that's productive, that you can squeeze the maximum amount of battery
life from. Yes, from AAs if necessary.

My ideal implementation would be AVR8, AVR32 if necessary. Not only are they
dirt cheap but we can clock them down to zilch with PicoPower, to get that
battery life. PicoPower is 0.2 mA per MHz at 1.8V, and the <1 uA sleep is
literally less than batteries will self-discharge in the box. It runs some
thin native-C implementation of a text-editing terminal, and a Wifi connection
is used to flush a minimal data stream back to a local server. When you do
things like compile or run, or debug, that runs on the host, but you have a
thin terminal that continues pulling almost nothing.

Even OLED power draw is nontrivial and it's hard to get OLEDs that are both
inexpensive _and_ large enough to be a viable display, so here's the next
clever bit. E-ink display. You only use power when you're redrawing it, and
you can probably redraw it leisurely at your own pace with a slow MCU. In
theory you can reduce refresh speeds even further by only redrawing a section
- the downside is you leave a "flipped line" outside the region. Which just
looks like notebook lines anyway.

Throw on a good 40% keyboard kit (is there anything that can be bolted down to
another board? honest question) and you now have something that's basically a
wireless VT100 but can do all your shit, as long as you are comfortable
working in a text mode with a limited refresh. This is a workable protocol
model - it's already been done! Hell, we have _more_ power than VT100 right in
the terminal.

To make it even cheaper you could pick some super common laptop model and use
that keyboard socket for your motherboard. Let's say, the old Thinkpad T420
keyboard, which is already knocked off in China like crazy and is good enough
to keep alive. Just plug their parts into the board. How much do they cost in
quantity 100k? Probably nothing.

I've run this concept past HN a few times before as a programmer terminal and
usually gotten a positive response for their own usage (would be good for a
dumb serial terminal too) but this could be a philanthropic usage good enough
to drive the concept.

The prisoner typewriter is the exact same thing, minus the wifi chip (USB dump
only), plus a warden's interface web program to oversee text, plus a clear
plastic shell. So just a dumb TRS-80 Model 100 again. And the battery life is
an incredible advantage when you have no regular access to a USB port to
charge, and you're getting raked over the coals by the commissary. How about
10 hours on a pair of AA batteries, with a reserve AA for SRAM retention, and
perhaps a coin battery epoxied on-board as a last resort? I think that should
be doable.

I'm actually serious about this, anybody else down? Prisoner's lives are shit,
but at least we could keep them from being raked over the coals for literal
typewriter supplies in TYOOL 2017.

The big problem would be dealing with the established player in the field who
would undoubtedly come down like a ton of bricks. Good luck getting approved
in the commissary when you are fighting a state-by-state battle with
legislatures against these guys.

~~~
InfestedNexus
Perhaps relevant to your interests: •
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart)
• [https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/)

~~~
stevekemp
That looks remarkably similar to the Cambridge Z88 which was my first thought
when reading the OP:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88)

Released in 1988 it was a portable typewriter, powered by batteries.

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kwhitefoot
The US does have some strange ideas.

And this thread seems to be all about optimizing one of the strange ideas
instead of protesting about it.

Of course other countries have strange ideas too, but the US does seem to be
the current world leader.

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Animats
Swintek also sells those clear-cabinet typewriters to the U.S. Government,
probably for use in classified facilities.

