lynxwinters

LXW-68K TV Game System

The distant present of virtual entertainment.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
Xuelder
@Xuelder asked:

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'

  1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. 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.


lynxwinters
@lynxwinters

I honestly have no idea what the use case is for these cyberdecks that people make. Part of me wants to think it's people goofing around with colors and form factors, that they serve mainly as art projects that also happen to run linux or something, and that's fine if that's the case. But something about it makes me think that no, these folks making these things see them as actually useful devices somehow, and I really hope that's just me misunderstanding things


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

the gibson-accurate cyberdeck is a breadbin c64 with half its guts sticking out, a GPIO interface with a Molex connector that nobody has manufactured in a decade, and (somehow) hooked up to a Bigscreen Beyond

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.

Funny about the episode being about an Olivetti product; they had a Tandy trs-80 model 100 clone that had a pivotable screen. My mother has/had one, and its more physically friendly than the Tandy model my dad had.

I once saw a custom computer build where the owner hit the power button and nothing happened. "Oh yeah", they said, "it sometimes does this". And then they held down the power button and jiggled a wire until it turned on. Now that's a cyberdeck.

in reply to @lynxwinters's post:

Eh, I get the impression they're much closer to art pieces than anything else. And I sort of respect that, just... I don't know. After the first person's made one in a given shape, why make another if it doesn't accomplish anything? And they're all useless to a one as far as I can tell. There's nothing they can do that a walmart laptop can't do better.