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

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.

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!