Amish Computing Solutions For The Luddite In Your Life

Could this hand-cranked laptop be marketed to the Amish? Your first guess would likely be “probably not.” But surely there’s some sort of demand for the simplest of computer tech – something so stripped down that it performs only the most basic computational functions without any of the bells and whistles of modern machines.

The most basic computing device is of course the millennia-old abacus, a tool which dates as far back 2700 BCE. But despite what this humorous jive would have you think, bead-free computing does exist, in one form or another, amongst our agrarian luddite neighbors.

Take this ad for a “Classic Word Processor,” (below) for example: A machine marketed within the Amish communities of Pennsylvania that advertises “no modem, no phone port of internet connection, no sound, no photographs, no games or gimmicks” sounds exactly like something that would be made “for the plain people by the plain people.”

According to one scholar of Amish culture, these simple folk don’t so much shun the idea of the computer as they do its tendency to keep its users connected to the grid:

“Not being on the grid continues to be universal in Amish life,” explains professor David L. Weaver-Zercher, author of The Amish Way. “There is kind of a symbolic thing with the grid, that the wires themselves are physically connecting your house. That is a clear connection to worldly ways of doing things that we want to avoid.”

If that’s true, maybe it’s not so inconceivable that companies like OLPC could start making the rounds on a couple Amish colonies carrying a couple of these babies:

But the Amish aren’t the only ones digging on barebones computing. Luddite writers like Paul Ford have their own versions of “Amish” computer lifestyle. Sick and tired of email spam and other distractions, Ford has downgraded to an MS-DOS computer running WordPerfect on a plain blue screen with gray text, and he couldn’t be happier.

I’ve started to enjoy computing again. There is no Wikipedia, no email, no constantly changing the MP3s I’m listening to, no downloading going on. The spam still piles up but I’m not aware of it, because my email program is shut down until I want to send a message.

Bonus:

For more on low-tech lifestyles, see our documentary on Technophobes, the people who think technology is slowly killing them.