There’s a product that I want to exist. While it possibly could exist today, it wouldn’t be quite good enough yet: A mechanical writing device that will last 100 years and will build up an entire market ecosystem around it.

Here are the only three requirements:

  1. There’s no charging, or even a charging cable. Minimal electronics of any kind. Every press of a key on the mechanical keyboard ever-so-slightly winds a mainspring (or series of mainsprings) which mechanically power the screen/interface/wireless connection via an escapement.

  2. It needs to run @RoamResearch (or, even better, the eventual open protocol which comes from Roam’s hierarchical, zoomable, referenceable outliner, which stands on the shoulders of All The Great Outliners That Came Before).

  3. Because its software is based on the most robust writing environment ever created, perfectly flexible and better today than the tools most people still write in 40 years later… this device will never need to be replaced. It should last 100 years or longer, like a Leica.

I am aware of products like the Freewrite by Astrohaus (I have both of them) and the AlphaSmart (I have every model). Both have issues and neither thinks big enough.

A writing-only device that has access to the power of the world’s best writing environment, and nothing else, would change everything.

Boutique companies could build their own versions of this, with different finishes and key feel and screen technologies. They could charge incredible amounts of money because the device would last forever, be handed down for generations.

Watchmakers and typewriter repair people and others like them, who have fewer and fewer things to feed their passionate mechanical craft, would have a whole new class of products to work on.

Any comparisons to steampunk are mistaken, because this is the opposite of steam. Not only is there no filthy hot steam… there isn’t even a battery. Just mechanical bliss and the soft whirring of some mainsprings if you put your ear against the device.

I dream of a world where one of the most urgent initiatives to combat waste, pollution, resource depletion, and climate change is to build things that last FOREVER, like film cameras and lenses, bicycles, knives, musical instruments, etc..

Digital is almost ready. THIS close.