The Quest for the AlphaSmart 3000 Software Update [weird essay/blog post thing] (Patreon)

This is an essay, or a blog post, or something, that I wrote today on and about the writing device I bought recently, the AlphaSmart 3000. You definitely didn't subscribe for this, and I'm sorry for wasting your time with it - you probably shouldn't read it.

But if you like old tech and weird special interest rabbit holes, read on. And please rest assured, this isn't the only thing I wrote. I've also got a new roleplay script written and ready to record - if it's not up for patrons this evening, it will be tomorrow. It's got vampires in it. It's good.

I just needed to get this out of my head.

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I’m an easily distracted person. I have ADHD, which doesn’t help — but even if it were not for that, I suspect being easily distracted is simply in my nature. This makes things that require a lot of focus very difficult.

One thing I enjoy a lot that takes a lot of focus is writing. Writing is something that, I have found, requires a lot of concentration, and requires you to hold a lot of thoughts in active memory. For me, if I get just a little bit distracted, it’s likely that whatever I am trying to hold in my short-term memory (in order to write about it) will be completely forgotten almost immediately. Just getting a notification, or seeing the weather widget on my phone’s lock screen change, or anything like that, can cause me to completely lose my train of thought.

This is particularly lethal for my productivity as I’m someone who relies a lot on entering a state of flow in order to get anything done. I’m not really sure how to define “flow”, and I don’t want to look up a definition, as I’ll probably get distracted by the results. But, basically, it’s being completely absorbed in and focussing on one task, and one task alone. Flow is the state in which I, and probably most people, get the most stuff done. Whether it’s work or something that I am doing as a hobby, I simply must enter flow. Otherwise, whatever I am trying to do will take 10x as long, and be 10x less enjoyable.

Entering flow and not being distracted has become even more important to me recently, as writing scripts has become 50% of my job. I need to write and I need to get my writing done on time, so that I don’t fall behind. Not writing isn’t an option. I need to do it. But forcing myself to write when I feel distracted and unable to enter flow, is painful and frustrating, and ruins my creativity.

To this end, I’ve recently become very interested in the concept of “distraction-free” writing devices. There are some currently being made — it’s quite a hip and trendy market segment. One company, Astrohaus, has made a few such devices now in a line they call “Freewrite”. One of them looks like an old typewriter, but it has an e-ink display at the top. Its purpose is singular; you write with it. It doesn’t have games or apps, it doesn’t send you notifications. It can be connected to the internet for one thing, and that’s to sync your writing to the cloud. This sounds great, save for two issues:

1. It only has a US keyboard layout. they offer no UK model. This alone is a dealbreaker for me.
2. It costs ~£500.

Even if they did offer a model with a UK keyboard, I simply couldn’t justify the price. That’s the price of a pretty decent whole-ass laptop. Expecting people to pay that for a very, very simple computer that you can do nothing but type with is just… I don’t know. I guess people are buying this thing, but it’s way too rich for my blood. They are currently taking pre-orders for a cheaper alternative, the Freewrite Alpha, but even than is £300. Still too much for something so simple. (And it still doesn’t have a UK keyboard option.)

There are a few alternatives on the market. For example, Remarkable recently released a keyboard case for their e-ink tablet, which, similarly, has no apps or notifications. And it has a UK layout! But… The tablet and case together would still cost about £500. So, what to do?

The phrase “distraction-free writing device” is what I kept searching for, and eventually I found mention of something called an “AlphaSmart”. At first, I assumed this would be another young start-up akin to Astrohaus with their Freewrite. But, it turns out, it is quite the opposite — and old company from the early 90s that no longer exists. Intriguing!

AlphaSmart, Inc., founded in 1992 by former Apple engineers Joe Barrus and Ketan Kothari, was in the business of making simple typing devices, primarily for the classroom. Now, in the ‘20s, their funny little keyboards are getting a bit of a second wind. There’s a surprisingly healthy used market for these devices, which are now coveted by some as the  distraction-free writing devices that Freewrite wants to be. The most popular — the “Rolls Royce” of AlphaSmarts — is the Neo 2. It’s the last device AlphaSmart made, before it was dissolved (the rights to the name and software acquired by a company called Renaissance Learning, which still exists — more on them later). Production of the Neo 2 ended in 2013, and that was the end of AlphaSmart.

Prior to the Neo 2 was, predictably, the Neo. Then, the Dana — an odd in-between device that few people talk about, including me. Before that, the 3000, then the 2000, the Pro, and, first of all, the original device named after the company that made it, simply the “AlphaSmart”.

Devices prior to the 3000 aren’t worth considering for any modern-day writer. This is because it would be very hard to connect them to anything — they’re so old, they don’t have USB. Instead, they use a serial port. So, if you want to buy one these days, you’re looking at either a 3000, a Neo, or a Neo 2. Skip the Dana — it runs Palm OS, instead of the custom super-lightweight OS running on the others, and only gets about 24 hours of battery life on a few AA batteries. For comparison, the 3000, Neo and Neo 2 all get around 700 hours. Yes, 700, not 70.

So, I went shopping on Ebay. While the Neo 2 is not hard to find in the US for a reasonable price — typically between $50 and $100 dollars — it turned out to be much rarer in the UK. I could have imported one from the US, sure, but the cost of shipping would have been prohibitive. Besides that it would had a US keyboard, not a UK one — 50% of the reason I was considering them in the first place!

No, I’d need to buy a device that was produced for the UK market. So, a 3000 it was — for some reason, they seem much more numerous here than the Neo 2. Neo 2s pop up on UK Ebay maybe once a month, and I was outbid twice before resigning myself to the less-coveted older model.

I’m typing this… Whatever this is. Essay? Is this an essay? Anyway, I’m typing it on the AlphaSmart 3000 that I’ve had for a few days. I quite like it. The keyboard is clunky and rattly in a way that I find quite charming, and I genuinely enjoy typing on it. It’s not mechanical, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing to me. I think the idea that mechanical is always better than membrane is false. But I digress.

There are a few little niggles I have with this thing. Nothing I would call a “dealbreaker”, as with the Freewrite and its ilk, though.

First, there’s no undo and redo. This is almost a dealbreaker, but not quite. I can deal with it. I just make sure not to make too many mistakes. If you somehow accidentally delete a file, it does have a keyboard shortcut that does its best to restore what you deleted, so at least you’re covered there. I’ve tested this functionality, and it works, for the most part — though it uses volatile memory, so it is not 100% reliable.

Another minor issue is with text selection. As with any other word processor, holding shift and pressing the left or right cursor keys highlights text one character at a time. This is fine and normal. You can also, once you have started highlighting, hold the CMD key while pressing the left or right cursor to select to the start or the end of a line. Lovely! What it’s missing — and this is a very strange oversight — is the ability to navigate or select one whole word at a time. Normally, in just about any text editing environment I’ve ever used, you could hold CTRL and press left or right to jump to the previous or next word. If you hold CTRL and Shift, then press a cursor key, it would select a whole word. This is really useful, and I use it very often. The AlphaSmart 3000 does not have this functionality. A bit annoying, but whatever — I’ve already started to adjust my muscle memory, and the frequency with which I try to do this before remembering that it is impossible is decreasing.

Possibly the most glaring omission, for me, is a word counter. It doesn’t have one. Doesn’t know how to count how many words you’ve typed. The conversation of what constitutes a “word” is actually quite a complex one, at least in the study of linguistics, and counting words very accurately can be computationally expensive, but it doesn’t need to be. I would be perfectly happy for a simple device like this to define a word as “a string of character separated from others by a space either side”. That’s a good enough metric for a 99%-accurate word counter. But this can’t do that. Not my 3000.

Some AlphaSmart 3000s can count words. Those that have had their software updated. So, why don’t I just update the software on mine? Well, this is where we delve into the murky world of legacy devices. Getting hold of the software necessary to update a device from 20 years ago is no mean feat. You probably don’t have such an old device in your house, but if you do, go try it. Most likely, whatever web page that once supported it has been taken down. So it is for the AlphaSmart 3000. Support for it ended years ago. The software is no longer available.

There is a community of enthusiastic AlphaSmart users who maintain a sort-of repository of their software. It’s not a very well organised repository, spread over multiple private web pages — or even, for some of the software, being literally posted around America on one shared CD-ROM.

But, the trouble is, those people can’t help me. They’re all in the United States, and US AlphaSmart 3000s are not the same as UK AlphaSmart 3000s. It’s not just the hardware that’s different, they run different software. Only very slightly different, but different enough that trying to install a US update on a UK device will probably break it completely. I didn’t want to risk breaking my new baby…

I think most people probably would have ended their search for an update there. Delving into enthusiast forums is already more effort than most people would be willing to go to. At this point, the sensible thing to do would probably be to say, “Ah well, I don’t really need a word counter anyway, This device is perfectly functional without one. I’ll just keep using it. Maybe I’ll finally get my hands on a Neo 2 at some point in the future — that had a word counter, it’ll be fine.” But that’s not me. No, I already had my legs in the rabbit hole, and I had my spelunking gear with me. I was ready to go all in. Into the rabbit hole I dove.

I started at the website allthingsneo2.co.uk. It’s dedicated entirely to the Neo and the Neo 2 — there isn’t a mention of the 3000 anywhere. Sad! But, not to be dissuaded, I sent them a message via their contact form. Within a day I’d received a message from a nice man called Chris L, who was sympathetic to my cause. He said he’d have a look through his files and see if he had anything that might help. I wasn’t too hopeful, but shortly after that he got back to me again, this time with an enticing zip file attached to the email.

It didn’t work, even in the Windows XP virtual machine I had ready and waiting — all AlphaSmart-related software is so old it won’t run in anything more modern than Windows 7.

Chris was very obliging and sent me a different file. This one… Did work. Wow!

AlphaSmart devices do have a concept of “apps”, after a fashion. Nothing distracting, mind. No ability to multi-task, thankfully. Mine has a word processor called “AlphaWord”, a calculator (just called “Calculator”) and something called “AlphaKeys”. I’m not sure what AlphaKeys does. I think it’s meant to help you figure out what key combinations to use to get weird characters like ø and ¥ and such. I don’t think about it too much, I just wanna type, and for that AlphaWord is all I need.

So, feverishly, I spun up my Windows XP VM and ran the updater Chris provided. It… It updated AlphaWord, from version 1.5 to version 1.6. As far as I can tell, the difference between 1.5 and 1.6 is in the version number alone. I haven’t noticed any differences or new features, and nobody is able to tell me what they might be. It certainly didn’t add a word counter.

Another quick email to Chris got me a fairly terse reply — and fair enough to the guy, I’d bothered him enough with all this. It said “System 3 was never adopted into the UK version of the 3000 updater”. So, bugger. What now? Give up? Surely I give up at this point. Chris runs the website dedicated to AlphaSmart devices in the UK. He’s probably the most knowledgeable guy in the country when it comes to these devices. I should give up and resign myself to having no word counter.

Nah. That ain’t me. Instead, I went on LinkedIn and did a bit of research, hoping to find a name or contact for someone who might have worked on this device directly. Sure enough, with surprisingly little effort, I found the name, then the email, of someone who was the managing director for AlphaSmart Europe Ltd from 1999 to 2019; Dirk F. At this point I really wasn’t hopeful. He didn’t even work there any more — Renaissance Learning, the company who you’ll recall bought AlphaSmart, still exists purely as a software company, no longer selling devices like the AlphaSmart. Why would this guy support me with a device that hasn’t been made for 10 years by a company he no longer works for?

Good question. But I fired off an email anyway… And he replied. 9 minutes later, from his iPhone no less. What an absolute champion. He couldn’t help me directly, but forwarded my email to “one of two people who could possibly help [me] with this”. He also said “Should that all fail, please drop me a line again and we can maybe sort you out with a Neo should you be interested”. I love this guy. I should be interested. I will almost certainly be dropping him a line later.

Shortly after that — less than half an hour later, in fact, these people don’t mess around — I got an email from the current UK Operations Manager of Renaissance Learning, Richard C. He provided some very useful information about what devices can and can’t be upgraded to System 3. Apparently, AS3000s that have “AS3000B” in the serial number can be updated — the “B” indicates they have a revised main board. If they don’t have that B, they’re too old and can’t be updated. I checked the label on the back and — rejoice! — mine has the B! But… Richard doesn’t have the updater to hand. Fuck!

Interestingly, Richard mentioned one other person who might be able to help. An “old colleague” of his, so he said, by the name of… Chris L.

That’s the end of the story for now, but I’m not done with this yet, folks. I will not rest until this UK AlphaSmart 3000 has a word counter. That, or I buy a Neo 2 instead. Stay tuned.