There's a lot of hardware out there that does 95% of what OP's does, though you'll pay a pretty penny for it (e.g. https://www.peplink.com/products/cellular-modems-adapters/po... ) though ther's been a flood of them from noname sellers on Aliexpress and eBay under the banner of "LTE Landline Converters"
As someone who is firmly in Portal's "target audience"
I would have enjoyed the game immensely with such an adaptive feature. Just like I appreciate the amount of work that Valve has put into closed captioning for their games.
It is insane because IBM wanted a wireless keyboard. If you're not familiar with the PCjr keyboard, it has two IR transmitters (they are electrically the same, just having two gives you a better transmission path). The PCjr system has an IR receiver.
Now, a normal keyboard cable is a standard two-wire serial protocol with clock and data. Being wireless, you have no clock, so you have to synchronize clocks, or have clock recovery built into the protocol. The PCjr does the former, using the 8253 timer chip.
The keyboard has no way of knowing if the system has received a keystroke, so the system must receive every keystroke - they can't be stored in a fifo, they can't be resent if the CPU missed it.
This rules out the possibility of using system interrupts - so when you type a key on the CPU and the IR receiver gets the start bit - the NMI line is raised, the 8253 is programmed to time the clock bursts from the IR receiver, and the CPU reads out every bit of the scancode.
The PCjr also famously has no DMA, so things like floppy drive transfers are both extremely slow and somewhat unreliable - the IBM floppy controller is somewhat additionally weird is that they disable interrupts as well. The only way the PCjr knows what the controller is doing is by polling its status register, and there is enough ambiguity that it sets a 555 timer that will reset the FDC and start everything over if things time out.
The combination of these two decisions means its inadvisable to type while your floppy drive is transferring data
How's the guts look? There's a lot of flash and pizzaz about aesthetics, but I work with files in the 400-800GB range on a regular basis, so I tend to prefer dumping gigantic SSDs into my work machines (I recently liquidated fortune 5 stock to get an 8tb disk[1]).
There's some words about "oh yeah you can upgrade this" but not many details. The only thing I've seen so far has been a single shot from the Pentagram splash where it looks like a fairly standard off-the-shelf mini PC that's been gutted and put on life support like a Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck.
I've always taken it to be that the color is unique to the situation/viewer -- a sort of pearlescent void-color that can't be described in any known language, but which just Is. More a physical phenomenon than an actual color, but distinctly hued somehow.
When many of the core datasets were being produced, a lot of these companies mangled the text to be "friendlier" to try and avoid certain issues.
The changes they made often resulted in this kind of weird nonsense: Swapping the word "Failure" for "Disappointment" in a vain attempt to keep it from saying "you're a failure", but also just stripping out words such as slurs and insults, resulting in at one point the hilarious situation in which Gemini for quite a while would INSIST that the lyrics for the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" contained "That little has his own jet airplane/that little is a millionaire" -- which in certain contexts changes the meaning of the song incredibly.
These hack-and-slash text manglings have resulted in some of these clbuttic sort of writing styles being used during LLM-assisted writing. A more famous version of this was caused by one paper: https://world.edu/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scientific-pape...
You're right, it is a bunch of LCDs on a bus (iirc rs485).
reply