Atari ...
Totally irrelevant perhaps, but in the late 1970s, when I was advising
Tektronix Explorer Scouts Post 876, the scouts and I hacked an Atari 2600
game console to be a breath-switch-operated message display and device
controller for quadraplegics at the VA hospital.  This replaced an earlier
design that quad vets used to create serial ASCII characters for a
teletype, also control codes to turn on lights, summon a nurse's aide,
etc.  Replacing an earlier design that emitted 5 bit BAUDOT characters.
The quads got very good at this; they could "blow 10 bits per second" after
months of "not-much-else-to-do".

There are vastly better small computers for such tasks now, and much
cleverer engineers and clients to deploy and to use them.  Perhaps someone
can create something amazing with King's ancient machine.

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