A laptop that does one thing

This one isn't for a client. It's for me. Don't get me wrong; I love AI. I use it every single day to get work done. But I also want a totally private space that's just my own to do a little creative writing. No AI helper. No temptations to rewrite this or that in another voice or from another perspective. I think now, more than ever, it's important to keep one foot in both worlds.

So, I'm working on creating an e-ink laptop that's fully offline. No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, n security leaks to check. Just a keyboard, a screen that reads like paper, and software that does one job (and does it well). I'm writing the constraints down now, before the first part arrives, so I look back and see how the project has changed.

Constraints

1. No radios in the hardware. Not disabled. Absent. The only way in or out of the system is through a physical cable, with plenty of security assessing what comes in and out.
2. One mode. You open it and you're in a document. There's no home screen or a thousand apps to distract you from writing.
3. E-ink (and accepting the drawbacks). Slow refresh, no animation, no color. The software has to be designed for a screen that updates a few times a second, which rules out most of what we'd normally do.
4. Battery measured in weeks. If it needs charging daily it has failed at being a notebook.
5. Repairable. Off-the-shelf parts where possible. If a key breaks we'd like to replace the key.
6. The software is small enough to understand. One person should be able to learn all its features in a single afternoon.
7. Nostalgia. This needs to bring us back to those days when computing fascinated and inspired us rather than stressed us out.

What we're deciding first

The screen, because everything follows from it: size, refresh behavior, and whether partial refresh is good enough for typing. Then the UI and making sure it only has the features that will help with its primary goal of creative writing and organization. Then the keyboard, because this is a typing machine and a bad keyboard is a bad machine. The computer inside is the least interesting decision and we're leaving it for last.

Where it stands

Nothing is built. We have a parts list with question marks on it, a mock-up of the writing screen drawn at e-ink refresh speed to see if we can stand it, and a rule that we don't order anything until the constraints above have survived two weeks of us trying to argue with them.