AlphaSmart

» see alphasmart.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

AlphaSmart was the kind of thing an american school district bought by the cartload. Turkish schools were not in that market and neither was i. Where i was, a school computer lab was a room you visited once a week if the school had one at all, so a machine designed to be handed to every child in a class was a budget line from a different country.

The device itself was almost aggressively small in ambition. A full size keyboard, a four line character display sitting above it, memory divided into eight numbered files you reached with the function keys, and a cable that let you dump everything you had typed into a real computer afterward. It could not draw. It could not browse. It ran on AA batteries for days on end because it spent most of its time asleep between your keystrokes.

Two Apple engineers, Joe Barrus and Ketan Kothari, started the company in Los Gatos in 1992 under the name Intelligent Peripheral Devices, and Kothari's brother Manish joined shortly after. The first unit shipped in August 1993 and plugged into the Apple Desktop Bus, so at the start it only worked with a Macintosh or an Apple IIGS. The pitch was arithmetic rather than vision: a computer lab cost a fortune per seat, and this cost a fraction of that per seat while doing the one thing the lab was mostly used for.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The Pro arrived in February 1995 with a PS/2 port bolted alongside the ADB one, which finally let Windows schools buy in. The 2000 in October 1997 added spell checking and could print straight to a printer with no computer in between. The 3000 in 2000 moved to USB. Then the Dana in 2002 broke the rule by running Palm OS with a wide screen, and it is the model people remember least, because the moment the machine could do other things it stopped being the machine.

What made it stick in classrooms was durability more than anything on the spec sheet. Special education departments used them heavily for students who struggled with handwriting. There was a joke buried in the calculator on the early models: enter something that came to 42 and the screen answered with the line about life and the universe. Somebody had put that in a device meant for nine year olds and left it there for a decade.

~ the long tail ~

AlphaSmart went public on NASDAQ on 6 February 2004 as ALSM and was bought by Renaissance Learning in June 2005, about sixteen months later. Renaissance renamed the operation NEO Direct in 2009 and shipped the Neo 2, which was the last thing the brand ever made. In late September 2013 the notice on the store said they had reached the end of the Neo 2 inventory and would not be producing more. That was the whole announcement. No press release marked it.

The strange part is the afterlife. A device built to be cheap enough to lose in a school became a cult object for writers, precisely because it cannot show you anything except the sentence you are working on. The secondhand market has been alive for over a decade and new companies keep launching expensive versions of the same idea. AlphaSmart got there first by accident, having been trying to solve a budget problem rather than a concentration problem.

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