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 homebuilt PC in a custom case. It's designed in the style of the fictitious consoles of twentieth century cyberpunk novels, and usually portable. 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
Types of computer: Cyberdeck | Home computer | Personal computer
