Hello! Funny you bring this up. Actually Jeff J I use them for displaying information using an app that presents itself as a Matrox Orbital display device. And for a while a company out there in the wilds of Illinois supported the Palm as an event logging tool. They made available an app that translated serial data thrown at it into Hex numbers and ASCII characters. Which I also use for debugging serial data delivery. I also collect them. Those guys and the Handspring work-alike. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Tue, Dec 7, 2021 at 1:30 PM Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
According to Wikipedia, The Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000 were the first generations of PDAs <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant> produced by Palm Computing <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA)> (then a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Robotics>). It was introduced in March 1996.
Is anyone still into them? Are there any surviving archives or repositories?
I reluctantly retired my Palm PDA as my electronic calendar because my Android phone's Google calendar is always with me and auto-syncs to other devices :-/ But I have heaps of accessories worthy of keeping them running for other uses.
I remember when the trains were full of business people "beaming" each other contact info and notes using the Palm Pilot, Casio BOSS or Sharp Wizard. Now it's just a cellphone app :-/
Citing Sharp Wizard - Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Wizard> The *Sharp Wizard* is a series of electronic organizers <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_organizer> released by Sharp Corporation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Corporation>. The first model was the *OZ-7000* released in 1989, making it one of the first electronic organizers to be sold.
Citing Throwback Thursday: The "personal organizer" we had before the Newton : Apple World Today <https://www.appleworld.today/2015/05/28/throwback-thursday-the-personal-organizer-we-had-before-the-newton/>
Back before the Newton MessagePad made a splash in 1993 as the first “Personal Digital Assistant”, several consumer electronics companies were making handheld devices designed to do all of the things that we take for granted now on our iPhones and Apple Watches — take short notes, check our calendar, make appointments, and look up phone numbers. One of these devices was the Casio B.O.S.S. SF-8000 ... B.O.S.S. stood for “Business Organizer Scheduling System.” This device came out in 1990
And there's the first smartphone:
IBM Simon - Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon>
IBM debuted a prototype <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype> device, code named "Sweetspot" in November 1992 at COMDEX <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX>
Telxon made handheld barcode scanners that were essentially PDAs, as early as 1983 but I cannot find any references. Does anyone have any pointers?
-- jeff jonas
------ And as the Doctor reads out loud his notes to the assembled crew, lawyer Perry Mason, with Duke asleep on his lap and Della who had Junior asleep on her lap, and Paul Drake who had one of the two in black asleep on his. Della taking notes asks, "Your saying that the Witness insisted that he saw our client actually bending over the victim?" The Doctor nodded, and adds, "Especially strange since the client has a twin, both are sisters and are the sort who look alike. The sister interviewed by Pauil insists she was nowhere near where it happened. And you Paul says you found witnesses to back that up?" Paul nods and goes, "Six of them it was a small meeting of the sort where they were all Friends of Bill A." From the couch in back rumbles Igor, "What is a Friends of Bill A?" Perry offers, "It's a self help group to allow people who're fighting massive consumption of alcoholic beverages to recover. It was founded by that guy when he saw how doing so damaged badly his family and even his work habits. He recovered, and wrote that book. It's the bible for AA and its related outfits." Paul then adds, "I've got Williams and Faulkner looking for an unknown triplet." From The Doctor meets Perry Mason an as yet unpublished memoir.