I settle into a chair in the den. The cool, dark, cast aluminum of the Freewrite’s case feels like it belongs here, next to the mid-century fireplace, far more than the supposedly Bauhaus MacBook that might fill my lap under ordinary circumstances. It’s been some time since I’ve used a typewriter—really used one, not just pecked out a form on one or admired another as a prop. But Freewrite isn’t really a typewriter. It’s what we used to call a word processor. Not the software program, like Microsoft Word or WordPerfect, but the hardware appliance. I’d tell you more about the history of word processors, but unfortunately I’m offline, away from the computer and unable to do the usual quick web search I’d run to refresh my memory about the earliest and most popular word processors.

That too is a lie, of course. My iPhone is in my pocket, whimpering silently for me to look it up. But I’m determined to immerse myself in the focused, intentional, writerly life of which the Freewrite believes I am capable.

Online distractions offer an obvious case, but it’s easy to forget how much the tools with which we write change what it means to write in the first place. Writing longhand on paper was different from typing ideas and sentences on a mechanical apparatus that pressed forged letters between ink and paper. It’s a transition that Friedrich Nietzsche made—the first major philosopher to use a typewriter, a bizarre-looking but reasonably portable Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, which looks a bit like a skull with keys on needles stuck into it at all angles. For Nietzsche, the typewriter offered a way to write despite his deteriorating vision (and sanity). He knew that tools changed their users; “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” Nietzsche aphorized. These are facts I happen to know just because they were memorable, not because I remember facts like these regularly anymore. I’ve long since outsourced such easily-rediscovered knowledge to the Internet.

As I’m congratulating myself on the feat, my nearly two year-old daughter finds the Freewrite as I set it down to get the door, where FedEx is delivering some bauble I had ordered two days ago from the magic box on which I usually shop online instead of writing. She bangs on the keyboard, declaring it “yo’s” (which means “hers”). The Freewrite designers seem to have anticipated this sort of nefariousness, and they cleverly require the user to press two red “new” buttons on opposite ends of the keyboard simultaneously to abandon the current document.

She manages to create a new document anyway, and I don’t know how to go back to my previous one on the device—mercifully, the files are automatically saved to my Dropbox, which took two minutes to set up on Astruhaus’s website. Stealing an unwriterly glance at my smartphone, I notice that each press of the “send” key also offsends an email with the material attached as a PDF. I’ve got about a dozen such messages thanks to my undistracted daughter. (Astrohaus co-founder Adam Leeb assures me that this option will be configurable, eventually.)