Back when I occasionally had some disposable income to spend on unnecessary tech junk, I got myself a Thinkpad X60 on ebay. It's a lovely little computer, one of my favorite form factors for a laptop. It's got a matte 4:3 display and a real non-chiclet keyboard that feels quite nice to type on. I had recently seen Vwestlife's video about it and there were plenty available on ebay for a reasonable price, so I picked one up. I bought that 10-year-old computer 7 years ago, and it's still going strong.
My original idea was to turn it into a dedicated portable word processor, and it served that function quite nicely. But at the time, I was working somewhere I had a bit of downtime and a computer I was reasonably sure wasn't being monitored, so I could do most of my writing there. I was also working the graveyard shift, so my unusual hours prevented me from going to the sorts of places I would use a portable word processor, cafes and restaurants and the library and such. So it didn't see much use at first.
I was glad I had it when my desktop computer died, because despite being nearly two decades old, it's still quite a capable little machine once you have some lightweight version of linux on it. I don't mean it's capable for what most people use the internet for, but it's more than capable for the sort of things I do. Firefox can sort of barely play youtube videos if you put it on the lowest quality, but if I used yt-dlp or an invidious instance to download them, VLC could play 720p video no problem (and on a 1024x768 screen, 720p is all you need.) I could play emulated games with retroarch and my USB controller. It even connected to my bluetooth headphones seamlessly. I could listen to music and browse the fediverse and read the occasional article. I could download books to read from libgen and play Cave Story. What else do I need?
Well, it's not a good machine for game development. Most of the tools I use will run on it, but the small screen and inability to plug it into a monitor really made it not suitable for any kind of creative work other than writing. Good for consumption, not so good for production.
Luckily, I now have a proper modern 2015 computer with Windows 7 I can plug into my monitor, so the trusty Thinkpad went back into storage. But recently I've been thinking of ways I can encourage myself to write more, so I decided it's time to make it a word processor again, and I thought it'd be interesting to some people if I talked about how. Distraction-free writing is something people are interested in, and there are apps and absurdly expensive bespoke devices available to help people achieve this, so maybe some people besides me would be interested in DIYing it.
First off, you obviously don't need a Thinkpad X60 to accomplish this, it's just what I like to type on. Any computer with a USB port and a proper configurable BIOS will work. You'll need a USB drive you can format, and it can be as small and cheap as possible. My current one is a 4GB microSD card in a microSD-SD adapter in a USB adapter. Not the most convenient option, but it's what I have. When I have a few bucks I'd like to get one of those tiny ones that sits almost flush with the USB port.
I used a Windows program called Rufus to format the card and create a bootable DOS flash drive. I then searched for a suitable DOS text editor. I had originally intended to just use EDIT.COM, the classic text editor that came with DOS 5.0 and later, but I discovered that it doesn't support wordwrapping, so it's good for editing .ini files and such but not suitable for the kind of longform writing I want to do with it. I tried a couple full-fledged word processors (George R.R. Martin famously swears by WordStar on a DOS machine to get his writing done) but they're overkill for my purposes: I don't need to do any text formatting and I don't need any advanced features, I just need to make a text file and transfer it to my main computer.
I settled on FreeDOS Edit 0.9a, a clone of EDIT.COM for the FreeDOS clone operating system. It looks exactly like EDIT.COM out of the box, right down to the eye-searing white-on-blue default color scheme, but it does thankfully have a monochrome option. Most crucially, it adds the missing wordwrap feature.2
When I want to write, wherever I am, I pull the laptop out of my backpack, stick in my USB drive, and press the power. It boots up almost instantly. I added a line to my AUTOEXEC.BAT file that immediately launches the editor with my BUFFER.TXT file, so I'm right where I left off.
( Short video demonstrating bootup time (1.4MB) )
Of course, I can create and save and load other text files if I want to work on something else. There's no on-screen battery indicator, but if the battery light on the machine itself starts blinking, I just hit CTRL-S and I can be assured nothing will be lost. With an incredibly light OS and no spinning disk, even this 20-year-old battery lasts a remarkably long time, and I've never found myself in a situation where the battery wears out before I do. This whole entry was written on the thinkpad over the course of a couple hours, and I could probably keep going for several hours more.
So instead of a bespoke device that costs six hundred freaking dollars for a single-board computer, mechanical keyboard and e-ink display, consider visiting ebay or a secondhand store and giving one of the thousands of old, obsolete and unloved laptops a second lease on life. You can get an old school3 chromebook on ebay for 30 bucks. I don't know how easy it is to install DOS on them, but there are guides that can help you jailbreak a chromebook and install linux; a text-only linux distro and micro will give you much the same experience.
2. Minor caveat: FDEDIT does "hard" line wrapping, so the text is formatted for the screen, but the file has a line break every 40 characters or so. Basically all it does is press "enter" for me once the cursor reaches the edge of the screen. Not having to do that is better than using EDIT.COM, but I'll keep looking for a good editor that doesn't do this. In the meantime, it's not too hard to fix the superfluous line breaks in post. ↩
3. An old chromebook that was used in a school, not "old-school". ↩
My original idea was to turn it into a dedicated portable word processor, and it served that function quite nicely. But at the time, I was working somewhere I had a bit of downtime and a computer I was reasonably sure wasn't being monitored, so I could do most of my writing there. I was also working the graveyard shift, so my unusual hours prevented me from going to the sorts of places I would use a portable word processor, cafes and restaurants and the library and such. So it didn't see much use at first.
I was glad I had it when my desktop computer died, because despite being nearly two decades old, it's still quite a capable little machine once you have some lightweight version of linux on it. I don't mean it's capable for what most people use the internet for, but it's more than capable for the sort of things I do. Firefox can sort of barely play youtube videos if you put it on the lowest quality, but if I used yt-dlp or an invidious instance to download them, VLC could play 720p video no problem (and on a 1024x768 screen, 720p is all you need.) I could play emulated games with retroarch and my USB controller. It even connected to my bluetooth headphones seamlessly. I could listen to music and browse the fediverse and read the occasional article. I could download books to read from libgen and play Cave Story. What else do I need?
Well, it's not a good machine for game development. Most of the tools I use will run on it, but the small screen and inability to plug it into a monitor really made it not suitable for any kind of creative work other than writing. Good for consumption, not so good for production.
Luckily, I now have a proper modern 2015 computer with Windows 7 I can plug into my monitor, so the trusty Thinkpad went back into storage. But recently I've been thinking of ways I can encourage myself to write more, so I decided it's time to make it a word processor again, and I thought it'd be interesting to some people if I talked about how. Distraction-free writing is something people are interested in, and there are apps and absurdly expensive bespoke devices available to help people achieve this, so maybe some people besides me would be interested in DIYing it.
First off, you obviously don't need a Thinkpad X60 to accomplish this, it's just what I like to type on. Any computer with a USB port and a proper configurable BIOS will work. You'll need a USB drive you can format, and it can be as small and cheap as possible. My current one is a 4GB microSD card in a microSD-SD adapter in a USB adapter. Not the most convenient option, but it's what I have. When I have a few bucks I'd like to get one of those tiny ones that sits almost flush with the USB port.
I used a Windows program called Rufus to format the card and create a bootable DOS flash drive. I then searched for a suitable DOS text editor. I had originally intended to just use EDIT.COM, the classic text editor that came with DOS 5.0 and later, but I discovered that it doesn't support wordwrapping, so it's good for editing .ini files and such but not suitable for the kind of longform writing I want to do with it. I tried a couple full-fledged word processors (George R.R. Martin famously swears by WordStar on a DOS machine to get his writing done) but they're overkill for my purposes: I don't need to do any text formatting and I don't need any advanced features, I just need to make a text file and transfer it to my main computer.
I settled on FreeDOS Edit 0.9a, a clone of EDIT.COM for the FreeDOS clone operating system. It looks exactly like EDIT.COM out of the box, right down to the eye-searing white-on-blue default color scheme, but it does thankfully have a monochrome option. Most crucially, it adds the missing wordwrap feature.2
When I want to write, wherever I am, I pull the laptop out of my backpack, stick in my USB drive, and press the power. It boots up almost instantly. I added a line to my AUTOEXEC.BAT file that immediately launches the editor with my BUFFER.TXT file, so I'm right where I left off.
( Short video demonstrating bootup time (1.4MB) )
Of course, I can create and save and load other text files if I want to work on something else. There's no on-screen battery indicator, but if the battery light on the machine itself starts blinking, I just hit CTRL-S and I can be assured nothing will be lost. With an incredibly light OS and no spinning disk, even this 20-year-old battery lasts a remarkably long time, and I've never found myself in a situation where the battery wears out before I do. This whole entry was written on the thinkpad over the course of a couple hours, and I could probably keep going for several hours more.
So instead of a bespoke device that costs six hundred freaking dollars for a single-board computer, mechanical keyboard and e-ink display, consider visiting ebay or a secondhand store and giving one of the thousands of old, obsolete and unloved laptops a second lease on life. You can get an old school3 chromebook on ebay for 30 bucks. I don't know how easy it is to install DOS on them, but there are guides that can help you jailbreak a chromebook and install linux; a text-only linux distro and micro will give you much the same experience.
2. Minor caveat: FDEDIT does "hard" line wrapping, so the text is formatted for the screen, but the file has a line break every 40 characters or so. Basically all it does is press "enter" for me once the cursor reaches the edge of the screen. Not having to do that is better than using EDIT.COM, but I'll keep looking for a good editor that doesn't do this. In the meantime, it's not too hard to fix the superfluous line breaks in post. ↩
3. An old chromebook that was used in a school, not "old-school". ↩
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