On Writing In The Bath

Or, How Fourteen Words by Douglas Adams Cost Me Several Weeks of Research, and the Better Part of $400

I was rereading The Salmon of Doubt recently and one of the essays really stuck with me this time through. I had always found it entertaining, but this time it was more than that.

In the essay entitled The Little Computer That Could (https://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-02-a.html) Douglas was describing his new Psion palmtop computer and he wrote:

"They’ve found me a room. I’ve unpacked my adapter plug. My PowerBook is charging itself up. I’m still not using it, though, because I am now lying in the bath. So I’m still using the Psion. I have never ever written anything in the bath before. Paper gets damp and steamy, pens won’t write upside down, typewriters hurt your tummy, and if you are prepared to use a PowerBook in the bath, then I assume that it isn’t your own PowerBook."

This got me thinking. I like to write, I like the occasional bath, I like small, useful technology. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

So I asked myself, "What do I have right now that I could use to write in the bath?" which led to a personal inventory that was, in hindsight, more than slightly embarrassing. Well, I thought, I have my phone. It kinda clamshells, and you can thumb-type on it. I have a Samsung Galaxy Fold 7, and I really only considered this for a few moments because, If I can ape Douglas for a second:

If you are prepared to use a $1,600 phone in the bath, then I assume it isn't your own phone.

So here is where the embarrassing inventory comes into play. I have 40 years of technology lying around here and most of it is, in some way or another, portable. I had to start somewhere, so I started at the beginning.

The first real portable that I had was a PalmPilot. At this point I own enough of them that I won't tell you how many simply because I wish to avoid an intervention. They were all quickly eliminated because they do not have a keyboard. Then I remembered the Palm TX in my backpack. (Yes, I take it everywhere, don't judge me) It has a folding Palm keyboard to go with it.

Aha!

...But!

It hurt my tummy, and balance (especially with a tummy as, um, rotund as mine) is a problem. Worse yet, that keyboard was never meant to be thumb-typed. It was designed to be touch-typed and doing that in a bath whilst it's wobbling on one's tummy is right out.

I should probably confess something here. I didn't buy many Palm devices as a collector. I genuinely used each and every one of them. I was even in Palm's beta program once, testing a ROM update they mailed out on an honest-to-goodness memory card for my PalmPilot 1000. The collection only became a collection after technology moved on without asking my permission.

Repeatedly.

So then I jumped a level of technology and started looking at the palmtops I already owned. (I never did get a Psion back in the day) The Atari Portfolio seemed like a great choice. Clamshell, thumb-type keyboard, runs on normal batteries (for like a year).

Eureka!

...But!

I bought this one back in '89 and discovered the only thing it was really good at was emptying my wallet.
It's got a tiny screen and it runs DOS, which is fine on a desktop, but a portable, handheld computer needs a little more customization to be useful. It has no built-in connectivity outside of memory cards. I do have one, but what I do not have, and to my memory never could find or afford, was the desktop card reader. So, even if I suffered through the terrible screen real estate and somehow coaxed a text editor to work, my writing would be stuck on the Portfolio forever.
Like luggage.

Damn and blast.

So on to the next generation (no trekkers, not that TNG). Let's crack out the NEC Mobile Pro 790!

Windows CE! (A real mobile OS.) Great keyboard, gobs of connectivity, memory cards, modems. This has to be the one!

Bingo!

...But!

Jiminy Christmas, this thing is HUGE. Somewhere along the line, "palmtop" had apparently become just a marketing term. This thing wanted a table every bit as much as the Palm TX keyboard had, and there was no way this slab was going to rest on my tummy in the bath; I would be too afraid of being pushed under and drowning.

It only lasts about forty-five minutes on batteries, and none of the Wi-Fi CF cards I have work with both the MP790 AND modern Wi-Fi. I spent the better part of two nights trying various CF cards, Wi-Fi configurations, voodoo, curses, and prayer on my router only to come to the conclusion that Wi-Fi is the work of the devil and Windows CE hates me.

Skewered again.

Okay. I can solve that problem. I must have something with a keyboard, that isn't a couple of metric tons of silicone and plastic. Well, there is this old Samsung Tab A that I think used to be a Nook. It might work, it's cheap enough, even if I dipped it in the drink I could replace it for under a hundy.
It runs Android (sorta, lol) and connects to Wi-Fi just fine.

Serendipity!

... Oh, balls.

Okay. It is painfully, maddeningly, rage-inducingly slow. The version of Android is so out of date that many apps (like Obsidian) simply will not install or run.

The irony is, the thirty-year-old tech works better simply because it was frozen in time and not updated out of usefulness.
Score one for the retro-crowd.
Plus, it doesn't have a real keyboard either.

Rats! (I got a rock)

I decided at this point that Douglas was probably right all along. The Psion 3a could be just what I needed. However, as I said before I never actually got one. They were always just that little bit too expensive and not quite the right tool for what I needed. I had (at one time) an HP Jornada 680, 690, and eventually the 720. I wasn't looking for a pocket writing machine. I was looking for something that could replace dragging a very heavy and very expensive laptop into wiring closets so I could console into Cisco switches and routers and edit configurations.

For once, though, I didn't hang onto these palmtops. They were very expensive at the time, and who knew I would go on a quest to write in the bath some thirty years later.
I sold each one for the next, and eventually departed palmtops altogether in favor of the Casio Cassiopeia, which was remarkably like a full-color, fast PalmPilot.

Everything is cyclical.

So, to eBay we go!

Finally!

...Foiled again!

Douglas extolled the virtues of the Psion 3a, a truly useful tool that let you get some serious work done in the bath.
Time, however, has not been kind to the 3a. Nostalgia has transformed what was once an expensive but ultimately replaceable tool into something altogether different.
Now it's a rare, usually broken, disaster of proprietary storage, failing ribbon cables, broken displays, and days upon days of rabbit holes following repair parts, storage solutions, and special cables until I came to the conclusion that the Psion 3a was no longer a device you could, without special care and circumstances, take with you in the bath. It was almost a crime against history to risk dunking one and turning it into 15 ounces of slag.

This was really when the problem solidified in my mind. It really isn't about the devices. Well... it is about the devices, but tomorrow it will be about something else. What it's really about is how our relationship to them changed.

When these devices were being created, marketed, and sold, they were not trying to be everything to everyone. Each one solved a problem, usually a single one. Most of them did it remarkably well.
Today, we have advanced the technology to the point where the category of replaceable single-use assistant no longer exists, though I believe the need still does. Why do I not want to take my Fold 7 into the bath to write? Not because it cannot be replaced, but because replacing means replacing my entire digital life.

Thirty years ago, when PDAs were commonplace, we used them as extensions of our computers, as, not to put too fine a point on it, assistants.
The big, expensive, fragile box stayed at home, safe and warm and dry in our houses and apartments. These assistants kept the vital stuff with us and replacing a PDA cost much less than replacing the big box at home. This is the space, the relationship that no longer exists. At least not in a usable way.

Today every device is trying (and succeeding) to be your everything. The Psion, the Jornada, the PalmPilot, even the Portfolio were the things you took so that you didn't have to bring your entire digital life with you, at least not the irreplaceable part of it. A dunk in the bath while writing only meant you lost that document (and a few hundred dollars), not everything. A modern do-everything flagship smart phone costs more than the BEF™ box you left at home. If you even have one anymore.

These rabbit holes I followed for the Psion 3a, and that disappointing conclusion, led me to the Psion 5mx which really is the best device for portable, pocketable, writing on the go. It's small enough, powerful enough, and has storage that can be read on a modern computer.

I reached out to a few sellers on eBay about them, and, in what has become a signature move for me, purchased a Jornada 690 while waiting for replies on the Psions.

A complete Psion 5mx is also on the way now, a working one with a good display cable and all the accessories. Though, the one thing I really didn't consider (another of my signature moves) was the very simple fact that it also cannot really be used in the bath because you cannot thumb-type on its keyboard either.

...Drat.

I guess the most ironic part of this entire experience is that I have an Apple PowerBook 540c and, of all the devices I tried, it was the most capable of being used to write in the bath. I would never, ever, have considered it in 1994, but now? I suppose it no longer needs to be someone else's PowerBook.

While I did not write this in the bath, I did write it on the PowerBook (and getting it running again after a year on a shelf is a whole 'nother story for the future). As a social experiment, though, I did take it to a Starbucks and set it up amongst the MacBook Pro's, Dells, and HP's to see if anyone would even notice. I don't know if anyone did, but if they did, they made no comment to me. The noise of the hard disk spinning up alone should have drawn stares since to me it seemed louder than the espresso machine. A simple 3.5-inch floppy disk was all that was needed to get the text from the PowerBook to the 21st century.

I still have not managed to be able to write in the bath, but Douglas inspired me to spend several weeks, the better part of four hundred dollars, and an embarrassingly large amount of time researching obsolete computers in pursuit of the perfect machine to do so.

I never found it.

Not because the technology disappeared. If anything, it has improved to the point where it should be a no-brainer.

I never found it because our relationship with technology changed, taking with it the role I needed it to fill.