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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.
Exclusive: Who Is 'PJ' Pamela Jones of Groklaw.Net?
Pamela Is A 61-Year-Old Jehovah's Witness Who Lives In A Shabby Genteel Garden Apartment In Hartsdale, New York
By: Maureen O'Gara
May 7, 2005 09:15 PM
A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit.
The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka "PJ," doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.
[Photo: May 7, 2005 12:37 PM - 304 North Central Avenue, Hartsdale, New York. The last known address of Pamela Jones, as the superintendent of the building calls it, Ms. Pam Jones.]
Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.
Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 304 North Central Avenue in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is in Westchester and Westchester is IBM territory.
See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts in Utah and to the Canopy Group so obviously this just isn't any Pamela Jones.
Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least, according to the super, who says he's watched people move in, have children, and the children marry and move away.
Now, this isn't your usual anonymous New York apartment. It's practically a self-contained village where the super goes for the old ladies' groceries when there's snow on the ground and people know each other's business.
[Photo: May 7, 2005 12:41 PM - 304 North Central Avenue, Hartsdale, New York. The last known address of Pamela Jones.]
But the super didn't know much about Pamela except that she had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, was "paranoid" - his word - and "sensitive to smells."
He remembered how he was cleaning paintbrushes one day and she came running down the stairs screaming "Fire."
She was also missing and had been for weeks.
Nobody there knew where she was.
She had up and disappeared one day, and the super was worried about her. He said her son had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some strange man that "nobody knew," as the super described him, had tried to get into her apartment while she was gone - the Medeco lock she had had installed on her door - something nobody else in the complex seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the door. But, as it happened, the super said, she had just sent in her rent in an envelope postmarked Connecticut.
Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut, 24 miles away. Sure enough, parked in the driveway was Pamela's car, just as the super had described it, a dark gray '90s Japanese number with a bunch of Jehovah Witness pamphlets tossed on the backseat.
The woman at the house, Barbara Jones Sharnik, told a disjointed story. She didn't know Pamela, Pamela hated her, Pamela wasn't there, Pamela left her car there because it got bumped, Pamela left her car there because she left town, and so on.
Afterwards Barbara called the cops, and then the cops called the number we left with her and the cops said that she was Pamela's mother and that Pamela was on the run and had shacked up with her mother because she had gotten "threatening mail" weeks before and that she had just gotten spooked again because "people were getting hurt around [my] stories" and had lighted out for Canada.
The purpose of this document is to be a comprehensive timeline of the history of PDAs. Specifically, my intention is to clarify which companies premiered each of the primary front-end features that are considered standard in modern (circa 2005) devices, so this is not a discussion of back-end technologies such as architectures, chips, programming interfaces, and speeds. By "premiered" I mean "first to actually include the technology in a relevant product," not necessarily the actual inventors of each technology. For example, it is almost impossible to know who invented the first miniature keyboard; similarly the invention of handwriting recognition technology goes back several decades. But we can say with near certainty which were the first handheld devices to include these technologies. It is the gathering of all these first-of-breed offerings that together created modern handhelds.
This research is an ongoing project of mine that began in 2001. My original plan was to compile it in book form, however, I decided to post it online in March 2005 after receiving media and research requests for such information. The benefits of sharing it now, I feel, outweigh the reasons for waiting until it's more polished. (My book plan now focuses on an even more ambitious project.) There are other PDA histories on the web, but none that in my opinion are accurate or thorough, and most of which are flagrantly incorrect. (Having said that, I feel comfortable calling most of my research complete, except where noted. Conversely, this document itself should be considered a beta version - I'm posting it in a hurry.) Please contact me if you find an error of fact or omission, or if you wish to comment.
So how did this all get started? I love gadgets, and the modern PDA is my favorite kind. It's the ideal combination of maximum computing power in minimum space. Until quantum computing and nanotechnology are perfected, which will probably be many decades from now, the PDA will retain the title of smallest practical computer. I don't know how history will judge the PDA, but I do know that history arrives in a hurry, especially in the computer industry, so it's of vital importance to record the past before it is forgotten. How could the history of such a new technology be so muddy? I started to become able to answer the question in late 2000 after moving to Boston. Computers and history, and the history of science in general, are lifelong interests of mine. I was suddenly surrounded by technical bookstores, had a new job that recharged my book-authoring dream, and discovered the very Newton-centric Boston PDA User Group. Of the more specific question "What was the first PDA?" I learned that many people have asked, but none of the answers seemed plausible to me. So I began intense research, initially online. I discovered the computer collecting world, such as the classiccmp.org mailing lists and the Vintage Computer Festival, sites like old-computers.com and vintage-computer.com, and various calculator collecting resources. Those resources are just the tip of the iceberg, yet the more questions I asked, the more I realized that I was entering uncharted territory. This continued to shock me. The most common explanation for the lack of historic focus on handhelds was that they are simply too new and/or uninteresting to typical computer collectors. Most of the vendor community also seems disinterested, as they are so focused on the future (or worse, they call everything "new" and "revolutionary"). My big concern continued to be that the product category was moving too fast to stop and record where it had been. After a few months of asking, I did finally find some plausible but controversial answers, but still my gut feeling was that there had to be a deeper, better answer. I decided to make finding it my long-term goal. First I needed a working definition. Mine is fairly simple: a PDA is any digital device that has a one-handed design, can function independently, and features a non-appliance, non-mathematical application set.
A 50,0000 word thesus about a loose piece of skin between my sack and my browneye about 6 years ago.
Turk: Let's play Steak. J.D.: What? Turk: Steak. The 1st person to finish their steak is the winner of Steak. -Scrubs
You have to try and impress us with how smart you are
Whereas on Slashdot, the preferred behavior of winkydink is to show us how smart he isn't.
You're doing a pretty good job so far.
First off, this guy is a total fool for not giving the Newton more props.. He OBVIOUSLY never used one: "Regardless of how fancy the Newton's interface is, a digital handheld organizer is a digital handheld organizer, and Wizard models existed four years before the Newton (not to mention many PDAs dating back to at least 1976!)." Yet he had already admitted earlier it was Apple that even INVENTED the term PDA :P Not to mention, to call the Newton an "organizer" is like calling a Cray a "calculator"
And althought the handwriting recognition of the Newton was lampooned in pop culture it STILL is better than anything every released. The only thing that I have ever used that even comes close is sadly TabletPC *ducks*
Seriously, bashing the Newton in this article is worse than stupid, it is based on some irrational fear of the Newton. Maybe one was being used to VNC into his server and it killed his mom!