HFS, I am watching your video The Weird Processor: Olivetti's PC Typewriter and damn, you just read for filth the cyberdeck community. But yeah, I do tend to agree whenever I look at subreddit posts about gutting pretty cool old computers and just gutting these beautiful, operating machines and just throwing a pi pico and/or zero into them. What do you think of the cyberdeck community in general, or is that offhand comment enough said?
Okay so there are three fundamental problems with the "cyberdeck'
-
the term came from a specific william gibson book (or a couple i don't remember) where it was not actually described except in vague terms. by all rights every cyberdeck should be different, but instead it seems like they're mostly apeing a couple specific references to i don't know what
-
whatever they're apeing, the ergonomics are dog shit. "keyboard in same plane as screen" is an unusable waste of silicon, end of story, no discussion.
-
the original gibson definition, and frankly the only one i respect, is that the cyberdeck is a heavily modified version of an off-the-shelf product, and (implicitly, imo) a shitty, older one that's all the hacker could afford, which has been patched and upgraded and kitbashed for years
thus: the actual cyberdeck - the one that fits the spiritual definition and text definition, and which is actually ergonomic and useful - is a dell latitude e6410 laptop with an i7 3rd gen swap, 16GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, two USB3 express cards, a 1080p panel out of a different model machine, and a power supply soldered directly to the motherboard. and, to wit, that thing exists, and there are people using them as envisioned.
