non-clacky

Technology I can't help looking at Asus's new PC-in-a-Keyboard with a kind of wistful nostalgia. In the early 1980s, most home computers were like this (I had an Acorn Electron and Commodore 64s), all of the work done in a single box, with a separate storage device needed to install software (then a cassette player, now an external dvd-rom). Though obviously this is a bit more powerful.

One of the key innovations is to replace the numeric keypad with a touchscreen, rather like having an i-something on-board, but you can still hook it up to a monitor (or one of those flat screen tvs if it has a VGA connection). It even has the kind of non-standard, non-clacky flat keys you'd find on one of the 8-bit also rans like the Mattel Aquarius. Sigh. Computing has come full circle.