Bondi Blue.
That was the "in" color for all things tech in the early 2000s. It was the quickest way for a company to show they were at the forefront of new technology without having to put forth much effort.
In tech circles at least, the color got its start with the Apple iMac G3, and through some arcane magic (mostly aggressive marketing) the iMac became a smash hit with the general populous.
Other devices quickly jumped on the semi-transparent blue bandwagon; everything from USB disk drives to small pocket calculators were made in t mimic the iconic design.
Which brings us to the device of the day: The AlphaSmart 3000.
The AlphaSmart 3000 was released in January of 2000, and was discontinued in 2006. The device was primarily marketed towards schools as a way to allow students to write, store, edit, and print text without requiring a computer.
The device was, in essence, a portable wordprocesor with a few key enhancements. It had a near full-size keyboard, four line LCD display, and ports on either side of the screen. On the left was a printer port for direct connections to supported printers, and the right was a USB port to connect to a computer.
Once the device was connected to a host computer, the magic really happens. By presing the "send" key on the AlphaSmart, it sends the text in its memory to the host computer - but not as a file. No, what this thing did was emulate a USB keyboard, and instead of sending over a file, it sent over each individual character, as a keystroke, to the connected computer. While on the surface this might seem unwieldy, it is a rather clever way of ensuring the highest level of compatibility - as long as the keyboard standard remains the same, the text can be sent without any issues.
And, in fact, it still can. Everything in this post was written on an AlphaSmart 3000. While the ergonomics of the device aren't the best, it's pretty comfortable to type on. The screen is still readable, and transferring the data wasn't a chore.
Considering this twenty year old device still functions with anything that supports USB keyboards, runs on only three AA batteries, and has a whopping 200 kb of storage (or roughly 100 pages of text), I'd say AlphaSmart did a decent job designing the thing. Hell, the device - which also has a rudimentary spell check built in - would be something easily distracted writers might want to invest in, since it's literally impossible to do anything other than write with it.
