Electric Sheep Comix

I have been thinking about building an open-source RPI Pico-based E-Ink writer for a long time. I was primarily motivated by my opinion that the Freewrite seems way more expensive than its components should cost. I also didn't like the industrial/mechanical design, and I didn't like a lot of the choices made by the company (cloud storage). I wanted a little more flexibility, such as being able to use my own keyboard. I haven't started a GitHub project page and unfortunately, I don't think I have the capability of pulling this off as a single hardware/firmware developer, so I'm putting my ideas into the ether so that maybe someone picks this up and brings it into a reality.

The webcomic "The Guy I Almost Was" put me down this path twenty plus years ago. There's a part of the story where the author daydreams about buying a typewriter at a garage sale - the same one William Gibson used to write Neuromancer - to pursue his own fantasy of becoming a beatnik novelist after nearly becoming broke, homeless, and rejected for not having the latest Apple Newton. https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/
Writing and editing became a large part of my career in technology, but I've felt I never developed the habits of a 'good' writer and am distracted like everyone else by the Internet at my desk and my cellphone everywhere else. Several writers have talked about using old word processors to write their novels and I thought I could be one of these people. Back in 2016 my iPhone 5…

Fun but also informative magazine articles from those times by well-known writers:

'The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce' by Tom Wolfe in Esquire magazine, Dec 1983, pps 346-374 about the 60s 70s and early 80s in SV: Fairchild, Intel and other companies, Willian Shockley, Gordon Moore and other people. On the web at

https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyce.html

Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer
Bums, by Stewart Brand in Rolling Stone 7 Dec 1972. Stanford AI Lab and Xerox PARC in the early 70s. Also at

http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

The Suburb That Changed the World, Jaron Lanier, New Statesman 28 Aug 2011. SV in the 70s and 80s as seen by a then-young hacker remembered much later.

http://www.newstatesman.com/scitech/2011/08/silicon-valley-computer

The Guy I Almost Was, by Patrick Farley - Early 90s cyber-utopianism in SV as seen by an aspiring outsider

http://electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

Patrick Farley's "The Guy I Almost Was" comic has a perspective on those magazines, starting from when he'd read them as an adolescent.

http://electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

(Warning: it has some NSFW bits -- apropos of cyberculture messages, and of his thinking at various times/ages -- and it's also a longish read, so maybe best for after work, for most of our jobs. Other than that, it's the most accessible critique of cyberculture that I'm aware of. I never read most of those magazines myself, so I can't say how complete it is, but I overlapped with some people from that space who were still trying to position themselves as future visionary elite, much like Farley describes, and it took me a while to figure out.)