[vcf-midatlantic] Swap Meet Update

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
Big palmtop. I always thought they were targeting the wrong audience
because the thing was much bigger than the ones from HP. It also had
an early touch screen keyboard. Oddly enough the only importer was a
shop named Cardinale Touch.and they were based in the same
neighborhood as Dell was. (In the beginning that is.) Funny bit of
trivia there's still a discussion raging on Hack A Day regarding those
palmtops. The writer during his salad days was a programmer who wrote
lots of code for a strange looking PDA, it was a PCMCIA card, but it
contained the intelligence of one, and was branded by the Roladex
people. The discussions or comments portion contained people offering
all sorts of discourse on the merits of the device he used a lot of,
that HP one, and he described a scene which prompted it.

Now if someone has both a Dell laptop from the same period as the
handhelds, and that family of palmtops, any of the model names for a
HP one, that Ethan mentions, then that would be worth a big heap of
diamonds. (Also the power crystals of Star Trek's starships.)
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 4:15 PM Ethan O'Toole <telmnstr at 757.org> wrote:
>
> > In my cases besides those examples of logic, I am trying to find a
> > very old by the standards of today, but certainly appropriate for this
> > list, handheld. It was designed either by, or for, the OEM behind
> > Seiko, sometime during the early part of the 1990s, about the time two
> > things happened, one was the sudden importance of being able to
> > collect data via handhelds, that of barcodes, and that those bounders
> > at Microsoft released their MSDOS6.22 to the embedded device market.
> > That market did nothing with that OS as they were waiting to evolve
> > for a different OS altogether. It would have been traveling with an
> > SDK for the methods, and even an appropriate laptop since the thing
> > used PCMCIA cards for storage of data.
>
> The totally sexy but possibly not very useful HP-95LX / 100LX / 200LX
> palmtops? They are DOS and IIRC had PCMCIA.
>
> The Atari Portfolio (See Terminator 2 and Parker Lewis Can't Lose) also
> ran MS-DOS, is pretty sexy, but had no PCMCIA. It uses a Mitubishi BeCard
> (HudsonSoft?) for storage.
>
> Those are the two that I know of that are MS-DOS. Was it a palmtop or a
> gun format? The HP's feel oh so nice.
>
>                 - Ethan
>