The History of PDAs in Words and Pictures

evanak writes "For the past four years, I've been studying the history of PDAs. It's all summarized in a 10,000-word article on my web site." This history is also illustrated with some pictures and photographs, which are worth it all by themselves.

Comments

1996-2005

[donnyspi]

The whole part between 1996 and 2005 seemed to be a blur in the article. Other than that, it was a good summary with some interesting pics.

Not PDA-friendly

[Tx]

Nice of the author to use a 950 pixel fixed-width table for his article, you'd think an article on this subject would be written so as to render nicely on a PDA.

Re:Not PDA-friendly

[Saeger]

You know why newspapers are written in multiple columns, instead of flowing to fill the page? It's faster, easier reading when your eyes only have a short distance to dart to get to the next line.

This is the #1 (valid) reason people still use fixed width designs when they could use a completely liquid layout instead. It's hell to read a 100% width article on a large monitor even after blowing up the fontsize. The preferred solution is to use use min-/max-width CSS.

Microsoft devices?

[David Horn]

You seem to have missed out the whole Microsoft / Palm battle, and the newest evolution of Pocket PCs, with VGA screens, 3D accelators and 624MHz processors.

You can even get a Playstation emulator to run smoothly on the newest ones.

Last paragraph

[aardwolf64]

That's seriously annoying. The guy writes an article on PDAs, then dismisses the past 15-18 years with one paragraph. What about the introduction of color?

Here is the history of the PDA. I've spent 940 words on calculators, 40 words on actual PDAs, and 20 words on the massive changes that have occurred in the past 15 years.

re: Partial List of Handheld Computers in sci-fi

[mynameismonkey]

There are six words missing from this 10,000 word essay; "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

It featured hypertext, multimedia content objects, a wiki-like browsing interface and of course collaborative document editing (which sounds bad but was mostly harmless).

Sturdy, rugged, built to take all kinds of knocks, apparently easily recharged despite country (or planet, for that matter) and quite affordable. All pre-1980.

Missing Option: Psion 5 Series

[G4from128k]

To me, the Psion 5 series is the ultimate PDA. It has a full suite of Office and PIM applications, compact size, a usable keyboard, decent screen size, and stellar battery life (35 hrs on-time with off-the-shelf AAs). Detractors might point to the lack of hand writing recognition, color, and MP3 playing, but I have absolutely no use or interest in those features (apparently, I am in a very small minority).

Currently, there is absolutely nothing on the market that is remotely as good as the 5 series -- everything these days sucks in battery-life or keyboard or both.

this disgusts me...

[0110011001110101]

FTFA - In his early 20s, Pitroda received the patent. "There was no contest at all. I got all the claims in one shot," he said. He shared the idea with colleagues at American Express and with Noyce, but neither pursued it. Lacking other investment resources, Pitroda put the invention aside. "I think it was too far ahead of its time. I didn't have the muscles to do it myself," he said. He moved back to India in 1982 and returned to Chicago in 1991, where he saw PDAs becoming commonplace. In court, he won royalty settlements from Casio, HP, Radio Shack, Sharp, and Texas Instruments.

So not only did this guy give birth to the idea of PDAs.. but also to the idea of patenting something general and sweepingly broad, and then suing later when somebody who isn't too lazy implements his idea... wonderful!