Cyberdecks have been popular for at least a year or so, but, yes, not sure why this one in particular made it to the frontpage.

Hackaday has quite a bit of cyberdeck projects on their blog, here:

https://hackaday.com/tag/cyberdeck/

I am guessing part of the appeal is having a portable device with a QWERTY tactile keyboard that does not have a locked-down OS.

Also, it is much easier to replace a damaged screen when compared to an iPad.

> not sure why this one in particular made it to the frontpage

Because of HNs connection to Lisp via Paul Graham, but also because Lisperati1000's creator Conrad Barski is a bit of a legend in Lisp circles, having authored Land of Lisp (LOL)

http://landoflisp.com/

Of LOL, PG said, "Turns out the border between genius and insanity is a pretty cheery place".

So now you see why HN holds the Lisperati1000 especially dear :)

Barski's music video[1] might give some more flavor to PG's comment. Brightens my day every time I watch it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc

How could I forget!

"Simple but refined, guaranteed to blow your mind! The Land of Lisp. Minimal and sleek but so clever you'll freak! The land of Lisp."

Now I too eat parentheses for breakfast, and lunch.

(Or at least I aspire to.)

Thank you.

I did not make the association with viaweb. Yay RTML.

I now have a deeper appreciation for the ethos of his particular cyberdeck implementation.

It seems to be a collision of custom keyboards, cheap and capable SoCs, easy access to displays and driver boards and a dose of nostalgia and tech weariness.

I like this one but I’d suffer it to be a bit larger to accommodate a standard keyboard and a pi4. I love the display, seems like you can buy them on Amazon and elsewhere since they are targeted at case modders and the like.

I guess many miss the days of:

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/898/Psion/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto

Among plenty of other ones.

HP LX series was a big one. The AlphaSmart Dana almost fits, too - it was a Palm device rather than just the dedicated word processor and keyboard functions.

My Psion Series 3A got lots of use until the third time I dropped it and wrecked the wiring in the hinge area, and it refused to power up again. Was sad.

The king of them all, of course, is the Radio Shack TRS-80 PC-2 pocket computer. Much cooler than the Sharp ones because Radio Shack.

The Gemini PDA from your planetcom link looks interesting.

Don't. I got a Cosmo Communicator, the successor device.

The good: the keyboard is great (At first - see below). It can be taken apart, which is great because you'll be doing that a lot...

The bad: Everything else. The device is fragile and impractical and the build quality is questionable. The case is sheet metal held in with tiny tabs - the hinge and bottom cover often pop off spontaneously. Breakages are common and no spares are available except by emailing support and begging; and if they agree, they will charge you the earth. The cover display cracked entirely by itself - a design flaw. Most unforgivably, after a year, the keyboard has worn in such a way that it frequently misses keystrokes. And - the coup-de-gras for me - there's no overcurrent protection on the right USB port, so it will melt the first time some lint shorts it (ask me how I know!).

Well, now I understand why people build their own.

;)

Thank you for the deterrent and inspiration to roll-my-own.

Adafruit and Sparkfun get ready.

Apparently Adafruit will be selling a device inspired by the PocketCHIP: https://www.hackster.io/news/diodes-delight-s-next-raspberry...

I love my PocketCHIP - but I wouldn't go with that form factor again - or at the very least, not with the type of physical keyboard they included. It was very unwieldy and generally not fun to use, I always connected an external keyboard.

The game controls were also garbage with that type of input sensor. It would have benefited greatly from a better keyboard, or a gamepad and doing away with the keyboard entirely.

Glad to see it coming back though!

Thanks for this, I've almost bought one of those a couple of times and your experience may help ensure I don't click "buy" in a moment of weakness in future. I absolutely love the idea of it but the implementation is insufficiently good.