Cyberdeck
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He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.
β The narrator, Neuromancer, 1984
A cyberdeck is a portable, homebuilt personal computer designed in the style of the fictitious consoles of twentieth century cyberpunk novels. In other words, it's an aesthetic DIY laptop.
While consumers are abandoning general-purpose PCs in favour of user-friendly smartphones, some computer aficionados are headed in the other direction, turning the quest for a free-as-in-freedom computer into an entire DIY project.
A cyberdeck can be built from, for example, a Raspberry Pi for the computer itself, a small screen, dozens of mechanical keyboard switches and keycaps, a custom PCB for the keyboard, and a custom 3D printed case to house it all together.
Such a rig could make for a decent portable word processor (a writer deck), allowing distraction-free writing of your latest cyberpunk novel. It could equally be purposed as a portable diagnostics or pen testing unit. Or it could simply be used as a highly aesthetic PDA. It's practically a working prop.
Cyberpunk: Blade Runner | Cyberdeck
