[smacktoward]

Back in the day, I had a mobile writing rig consisting of a Handspring Visor PDA, the wonderful Stowaway Keyboard (see http://danbricklin.com/log/stowaway.htm), a word processing app called Wordsmith (http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/2182/review-wordsmith-20/), and a modem that plugged into the Visor’s Springboard expansion slot.

It was great! The whole package fit in a couple pockets, you could turn it on and be typing practically instantly, and the modem made it easy to transfer your work (and also let the setup do double duty as an e-mail terminal). You could print from it wirelessly to any printer that had an IrDA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Data_Association) port. And the whole thing ran for ages on a couple of AA batteries, which were cheap and universally available when you needed to replace them. The only downside was the Visor’s low-res monochrome display, but for writing that wasn’t too serious a limitation. I still miss that rig.

The AlphaSmart products seemed like an attempt to bundle this kind of cobbled-together DIY rig into a single product with everything included in one box. I never had the chance to use them, but I was disappointed they never seemed to find an audience.