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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.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
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See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts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.
This 'history' is still beta. Version 0.9 indeed.
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.
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.
Whoa, 10,000 word article! You expect me to read that? Besides, there's like 17 pictures on there. With the conversion rate, that's 27,000 words! Forget that, buddy!
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
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.
Oh no... it's the future.
I think Slashdot mods need to be a little more selective about what they post. This is the cyber equivalent of a puff piece, like writing about the history of rubber spoons. I absolutely could not care less, and I want 30 seconds of my life back. I can't wait until next week's fascinating website, the history of MP3 players!!11111
Wow, it has both pictures AND photos! (brought to you by the department of redundancy department) Man that's a big farking article.
Statesmen serve to better the country and help the people.
Politicians serve to better themselves and help friends.
Redneck Palmpilot.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Quite an interesting article. I never realized that Thomas Edison built the first PDA in 1906. It was called the Edison Automatic Electric Calendar. It weighed close to three tons and could remember up to five appointments at once.
They've come a long ways since then...
Unknown host pong.
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.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Did anyone else read the news as "Please slashdot my web site" ?
Sadly, the pictures might not be big enough for that.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Word's telling me that it's 9446 words. That's quite a bit short of 10,000...
First post... p.s. tubgirl.com
Oh Look! Here's an article we can link from slashdot that links all its pictures from the original sites. How many servers are we going to take down with this one?
Hmm, now if we could just use the same concept on botnets....
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.
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
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.
-- Religion is not an exact science
The Tandy PC-6 would be IMHO a good addition. I had one in junior high in the mid-80s; it spoke BASIC and assembly. Not too impressive these days, but back then a pocket calculator -- with 16K(!) of memory, and which spoke BASIC was amazing. I even wrote a crude 3D version of "Hunt the Wumpus" for it.
The On-Hand PC is also pretty cool. I bought one a while back. While it goes through CR2025 batteries like they're candy -- and two at a time -- the idea that you can program yourself a new watch when you get tired of the old one is very cool.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Way. Too. Much. Free. Time.
Find me in ~/.sig
..include the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy, the most useful pda in the known universe!
del1ver. Some of a relatively stand anymore, 'superior' machineu.
I have one of those sharp PC-1211 or similar model devices sitting at home. Being programmable in Basic meant that I could mess with it during math class to do my matrix transforms for me...
And simple graphics capabilities let me make games too.
Fun little device.
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
PDA goes all the way back to Adam & Eve. As the story goes...."That night, God took a rib from Adam's side and made a woman. When Adam awoke the following morning, he found a wife, Eve, lying asleep beside him. Adam was so happy. He took her hand and she woke up. She looked up at him and smiled."
PDA is very old, indeed.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
What about the paper based "organizer." Or items an abbacus? Stop watches? Anything that is protable and and manages data, really. Also, did he mention the first uses of touchscreens? I dunno. Its kinda hard to read in that format. He needs some CSS formatting. I stopped reading.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
actually it is mentioned
I had an Atari Portfolio back in 1990 (I think it was 1990) and I still like it better than any other I've had. Mind you, it's not that it worked better, or was more capable. It's more an issue of capability for it's day and the fact that it was made by Atari of all companies. It was just an amazing little device that I could use in place of my laptop at the time (a Dell 386/SX-16). I wish I still had it just for fun. What a neat little device.
This article belongs in Wikipedia.
That is all.
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!
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
... how articles now come with warnings not to RTFA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assi stant
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!
This article is chock full of good information and deserves a good home where people can easily find it.
Such as the AT&T "GO". There was a LOT of amazing stuff that came and went between '93 and '96. If you blinked, you missed it, but almost every one introduced some significant step in the evolution.
And as others have stated, kind of glossed over the Palm/WinCE early days and eventual paths that lead us to now.
I'd give it a "C+" and say "needs more work"
The Microwriter Agenda. While the linked article incorrectly mentions it was the first PDA, it did have one very inetersting feature; built into the right hand side of the device was a 5-key microwriter input system which allowed for 'blind' input. This is a variant of a chorded keyboard - quite an interesting read.
One thing that everyone forgot about is that in the early days of PDAs there wasn't a really good way to move information between your PIM (Personal Information Manager) and your PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).
For those lucky enough, you could get your secretary to do it. For everyone else, well, the process involved a lot of typing. And PDAs weren't really made for data entry, as you can imagine.
Enter IntelliSync, by IntelliLink. They were the first (I believe) data synchronization software independent of the manufacturer or OS. In fact, they were often rebranded by the manufacturer.
They made it less painful to synchronize with your PDA. As a bonus, it was possible to move between handhelds by synchronizing to your data from one source to another.
This, of course, was before the Palm Pilot, which probably had the best information synchronization feature of any PDA to date. Instead of being an add-on, it was "part of the package" and worked really well. That, coupled with the small form factor and massive (for the time) data capacity made the US Robotics Palm Pilot a must-have.
Hey,
Well, I appreciate all the feedback, kind and otherwise...
I wish some people would READ it all before commenting. For example:
- Per the article's headline, it only covers the really evolutionary years, from 75-95. So I didn't "miss" from 96-now as one person said here.
- A few people said I should've include the Hitchhikers Guide. I did, read more carefully.
- "You didn't include [x] PDA." That's true. The article only includes devices that truly pioneered some new step forward, that did something others hadn't done before.
- "The Newton Rulz"... I'm not going to touch that one. Already wearing my anti-Reality Distortion Field vest.
As for the (many!) of you who sent me kind and insightful personal replies -- thank you, I do appreciate it.
Will someone please explain to me how the VERY FIRST POST is somehow modded as "Redundant"? How about we mod the mod as "clueless"?
Also completely missing from his article - the contributions (largely lost) of General Magic, which was the counterpoint to the Newton team (having been founded by ex-Apple engineers, like Andy Herzfield). They came out with the MagicCap OS, which was lightyears ahead of it's time (with a long-lasting lithium-ion batter, back in 1995!), and still (in my opinion) unmatched in it's ease of use. Surviving units from Sony and Motorola give a glimpse of what might have been. Unlike the Newton, programming for MagicCap devices really didn't take off.
Being able to program the USR Pilot (later the USR, then 3Com PalmPilot, before becoming the 3Com/Palm Palm), was the biggest reason for it's success. Thanks to the efforts of a handful of enthusiasts (like Darrin Massena), who got GCC working to cross-compile Palm-compatible 68k binaries, and to USR, for not getting bent out of shape by someone else using their header files, Pilot programming took off, a huge library of 3rd party freeware/shareware became available, and the dominance (for a time) of the Palm platform was assured.
Tricorder...
...the "Tandy 100". Portable (but not pocket sized) and widely used as a mobile typewriter by news reporters in the mid 80s.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Mentioned. Fictional.
Personal Data Assistant (PDA): A PDA is a handheld device (e.g. Palm Pilot®, PocketPC®, etc.) that may combine many computing activities. PDAs that are more powerful may function as cellular phones, fax transmitters, web browsers, and personal organizers. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/secureweb/glossary.asp #pda
Douglas Adams did wish that he had taken out a patent for the PDA as a direct result of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The device in the TV series was very similar in design to the early Psion Organiser.
Per the Articles Title "THE EVOLUTION OF THE PDA"
Per the Articles First sentance "he 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,"
And so, yes, you did in fact "miss" from 96 until the present date as you state intention to discuss the origin of features found in pdas up to the current year of 2005. As you did not discuss anything that came about after 96, you are missing features.
Also. "A few people said I should've include the Hitchhikers Guide. I did, read more carefully."
Mentioning the title of a book in passing does not constitute including the Hitchhikers Guide in your article.
~~ Please keep your arms, legs, and outright stupidity inside the ride at all times. Thank You ~~
...that a portable computer called the "Linus" ran MS-DOS!
I'm sorry, but I owned a Newton and I don't agree. At the time the MP was released in 1993, there were many similar devices in that category. Yes, Apple did coin the phrase PDA, and I give them credit for it. But overall I wasn't a huge fan of the PIM apps and the handwriting recognition was abysmal until you loaded Palm software (before they made the Pilot)'s Graffiti on it. Palm made the Casio/Tandy Zoomer PDA apps, and I actually thought those were a lot more useful than the Newton's, though the Zoomer sucked pretty bad due to the low-contrast screen and slow CPU. Anyway, the Newton did have some nice things about the OS and interface that were pretty unique and not even included in today's PDAs but overall while I had fun with the Newton it was a pretty flawed device.
Sturdy, rugged, built to take all kinds of knocks
Not to mention it could survive being tossed in a river on prehistoric Earth. It kept on working even after having spent quite a while in the water.
The whole part between 1996 and 2005 seemed to be a blur in the article.
Maybe that's because the HEADLINE reads "1975-1995".
you insensitive clod!
Of course I got mine for free (Plam Zire), thrown in with a Dell Poweredge server.
Perfectly suitable for me, and I didn't have to go out and risk a few hundred on something I didn't like and would end up giving to the nephew.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Palm based devices suck. Microsoft Windows Mobile based devices suck. Yeah yeah yeah everyone loves their $500 millions-of-colors-video-camera-phone-wireless bricks. Sorry, but a low cost simple PDA with long battery life would kick ass. If Apple could put out a quality iPod Mini priced Newton that fits into my pocket I'd buy one in a second.
Speak truth to power.
This guy forgot the #1 PDA of all times, The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, sure you have to be an editor to update the device, but this was one of the the premeir concepts of all time.
CSS takes stuff and splits it across multiple files. It also zooms poorly, as it often seems to make assumptions about the resolution I'm running at.
Tables are fine for formatting a web page. CSS might be the perfect, but tables are definitely the good. And the good has been working and tested for some time, and the perfect is still a bit away from perfection.
Cool article, but there's no mention of Go's PenPoint or the hardware it ran on (originally made by Go, then by Eo).
But was mysteriously missing from the list of fictional references in TFA...
see topic, parent is trolling
That's BS.
toresbe