Precursor: an open-source mobile hardware platform

Back in the days before handwriting became an obscure niche skill, we were probably attracted to computing in part because *they can write for you*. Suddenly you can write as much as you like and have it typeset in something that looks so good it shocks your teachers (hello, TeX) rather than turning out stuff even you can't read at perhaps four words per minute. And it doesn't hurt!

(yes, handwriting hurts if you're bad enough at it. Everything cramps in well under a minute because of how hard I had to grip the pen to get any control at all.)

Of course that meant I wrote far too much instead of far too little. What my teachers thought of *that* development is unrecorded.

It's a shame my school was so hidebound that this was all forbidden out of hand until I was in the sixth form. Five years of pointless pain and grades so permanently terrible that to this day I don't know how good I am at classical scholastic subjects, only that my handwriting was bad. Couldn't have the pupils forgetting how to write by hand! That's a more important skill than anything else they could possibly learn! (This period was 1987-1992, so word processors were not unknown unless you were stuck in a ten-year-deep time warp.)