The History Of Tiny Computers (PDAs) - Where Did They Go?

remember pdas well if you're a young viewer the answer might actually be no well it just so happens that I've been stockpiling these old devices so let's open them up and explore some of these now useless bits of tech but what is a PDA that acronym stands for personal digital assistant the early 80s saw a number of different ones such as the Scion organizer which looks like a glorified calculator with a very small display the two kilobytes of ram would have limited its usability they kind of look like this thing all inputs done using the tiny buttons in the form factor of a TV remote this can play Blackjack pretty impressive for a device from 1978. it's powered by three AAA batteries which would have been much poorer quality 45 years ago but I do really like the display type as well they were common before LCDs became cheaper but I must admit the blackjack game is not very user friendly without the manual there's no way you're going to be able to understand by 1987 you could get one of these I found this advertisement for a Cambridge z88 in a macro Magazine from May of 1990 for just under 1 000 Australian dollars you could get the best thing next to your MacIntosh and while the description is quite lengthy it is still a very basic device and the ability to connect to the Mac was an extra 350 add-on yikes but these devices didn't really take off until the early 90s when LCD technology had Advanced and prices were reasonable enough for everyday people to justify and today's video wouldn't be possible without AGM and their new rugged smartphone the guardian G2 which comes with a charging brick and USBC Cable in the Box you really can't take that for granted these days it features a long-range thermal camera which can even detect far away objects its drop proof dust proof and waterproof at 1.5 meters up to 30 minutes and not only does it have a headphone jack it has a loudspeak on the back capable of 109 decibels with a large 7000 milliamp hour battery I got through three days of use without any problem and something that I find really useful is the upwards facing torch which is nice and bright with NFC a bright High refresh rate display and good performance what more could you ask for thanks for AGM to sending this over and if you want to know more check out the link in the description below Scion struck a winning formula with their Series 3 palmtop computers debuting in 1991. this particular one the 3A a later revision features a much larger display and 2 megabytes of ram an archive of Scions website states that the 3A was the world's favorite man I looked a lot younger four years ago and thankfully this PDA hasn't degraded at all since I made this video back in 2019 while it's feature Rich having large hands does make it somewhat difficult to type on I don't believe there were any Wireless networking add-ons so to communicate with the outside world you need to hook it up to a computer this is a common feature with nearly all of them before the early 2000s when Wi-Fi Bluetooth and cellular connectivity became more mainstream these devices store data in what is essentially Ram unless you shelled out for an expensive solid state flash memory card meaning that it's volatile and requires power to keep the data stored most early pdas and Pub tops use a backup battery just like this one which stores the data when you inevitably have to change out the main batteries But be sure not to leave these in when storing the device they may eventually leak even the little button cell ones Apple took a different approach with their Newton line of pdas focusing heavily on the use of a touch screen this design resembles what most of us would think a PDA is today and I just love how this ad from early 1994 says the Newton message pad is here ready to assist you in a thousand ways and through the mid 90s it did see a lot of support and numerous attachments such as a barcode scanner an 800 Wireless networking adapter and cellular attachments to GSM enabled phones if you just had to send a fax from your Newton you could have hooked it up to one of these bad boys this one even has the original Optus GSM SIM card while the Newton did have several revisions and was a neat piece of Hardware even articles at the time stated that the Steep price tag of 1 395 Australian dollars was a stumbling block for Mass market adoption for pdas to become mainstream they had to be cheaper the latter half of the 90s introduced a plethora of Cheaper palmtop style pdas sharp was a brand that released a number of these at various price points this here is the zq 650 with the documentation implying this came out in 1997 and I bought this for next to nothing many years ago but sadly the display has degraded somewhat over the years this appears to be a common problem with a similar one I saw on eBay suffering in the same way it's got a pretty standard assortment of PDA features with one megabyte of memory you could definitely install some additional applications using a dock you can connect it to your PC or Macintosh but it seems like you'd need this piece of software to do it intellisync by Puma Tech costing 69.95 at the time I'm sure it exists somewhere online however my Sharp PDA didn't have the CD in the box but it is neat looking back at the old archived Puma Tech website from 1997. it's a cool little pump top machine it's just a shame that the LCD has gone bad though at the same time Apple threw their hat into the ring with a PDA that closely resembles a laptop but make no mistake this is a glorified PDA running Newton OS but the lower price compared to a conventional laptop of the time made this an appealing option for schools and educational institutions it even featured a few ports a headphone jack and a PC card slot and not design choice is the addition of a tripod mounting thread although I have a feeling this was not the way it was intended to be used the display hinge can also fold out a full 180 degrees perfect for writing notes using the touch display and there's a very chunky stylus to do just that so let's power it on and take a quick look shall we after the pleasant little startup jingle we're asked to calibrate the display this is the case with nearly every resistive touch screen on these old pdas built-in are a pretty standard Affair of PDA Essentials including a calculator typing program and the ability to quickly write down notes having a fairly normal sized keyboard makes for a pretty usable typing experience it would be even better if the keys weren't so stiff though released prior to the first iMac G3 this was one of the first Apple devices to have a translucent case and of course as you know the late 90s saw this trend really take off and out of all those devices we've looked at so far this is the first one with a display backlight that doesn't suck but while Apple left the PDA space in early 1998 the company Palm a division of 3com had been chipping away at a successful pocket computer formula enter the Palm 3 PDA the perfect companion for your PC released in early 1998 a successor to their earlier Palm Pilot devices adding in more RAM and functionality to the package that most of us would recognize as a PDF today create detailed to-do lists note the day's fire drills compile your top 5 money making ideas wow what an exciting time to be alive even seemingly mundane tasks were exciting back in the 90s and I paid just 12 for this boxed example even making a YouTube video about it back in 2011 before boxing it up again let's see if it survived all of those years and hopefully I remembered to take out the batteries and thankfully I did with some batteries in I began the setup this PDA has a 160 by 160 monochrome display capable of showing four different Shades of Gray and a whopping two megabytes of ram which was nothing to scoff at back in 1998 and flipping through the included accessory catalog we can see that a ram upgrade was sold to bring Palms older pdas up to the amount you would have found in the model 3 and just like the other ones we've looked at it uses a pleasant green backlight really only effective in near Darkness though you could connect this to your PC using the Cradle or the optional modem adapter and I'm not sure which country these are in but now's the time to grab one of these cheap if you want to if you're using Windows you can use the included connection software Mac users had to pay an extra 14.95 for the privilege the Palm 3 feels super sturdy and really cemented Palm as a dominant PDA maker at the time and surprisingly it was made in the USA a rare thing to see these days when it comes to electronics and after owning it for so long I'm glad to see that it still works fine and during the end of the 90s Scion weren't resting they had several palmtop PDA devices on the market such as the Scion 5mx for the business of life this model in particular had issues with the hinge failing it's a complex one and mine eventually failed as well the batteries were left in there too long by the previous owner and to remove the small amount of battery acid I sprayed into misopropyl alcohol and removed the debris with a Q-tip while it isn't color the display outputs an impressive 640x240 with 16 Shades of Gray another impressive aspect is the surprisingly usable keyboard in such a small device it's just a shame that the complex hinge mechanism has failed maybe I'll take a stab at fixing it in a future video by late 1999 Palm were pretty successful with many different devices on the market I purchased a box of these Palm VX pdas off of eBay for very little money in hindsight the fact that these runoff of internal lithium batteries instead of the user replaceable double or triple A's isn't good now it's very unlikely they'll even turn on unless the battery is still functional sadly it's fascinating to look through these old brochures there's even an iMac G3 pictured along with the usual carry cases and mountains of accessories and here we've even got a price for that modem adapter I saw mentioned with the Palm 3 not cheap at all and one of the pdas even had this Chinese or perhaps Japanese sticker meaning maybe the battery was replaced and another one has the front place literally falling right off the first one no signs of life even after being left to power up for a good 20 minutes maybe the second one will function and yeah it eventually did turn on and the battery held some charge this would end up being the only one to show any signs of Life sadly and so far this is one of the sturdiest feeling ones the metal casing goes a long way to helping this device feel lot more premium and this is likely the only functional one thanks to having the battery replaced at some point in time the early 2000s saw a notable shift in the capability and functionality of pdas color screens were standard by this time gone were the days of 16 Shades of Gray more and more devices featured Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity such as this the Scion techlogix notebook Pro running Windows CE a stripped down version of Windows supposedly designed for pocket computers this Scion took the fancy hinge design small but usable keyboard and charm of their earlier Palm tops and made them into something closely resembling a traditional laptop it's usable but the spacebar is a bit hard to press sadly and if you do own one of these and is storing it away make sure to take out the backup batteries which can be found underneath this little door and for a tiny notebook it had a good selection of ports a 400 megahertz armbase processor 128 megabytes of RAM and expandable storage via a CF card but running Windows CE does limit its usefulness quite a bit the number of compatible applications is far less than if it was running a full version of Windows and while it runs on a rechargeable battery it's thankfully very easy to remove but finding a replacement may prove quite challenging these days as there are very few of these around the trend of small laptop style devices eventually died out in the late 2000s with the most prominent arguably being Sony's viop series which I covered previously on my channel by 2005 both palm and HP still sold pretty conventional pdas on the low end but the high-end models feature GPS as well as cellular connectivity making them pretty close to what we'd call a smartphone today the Palm tungsten E2 was a budget model and you guessed it I bought a box of them cheap off of eBay the tungsten name doesn't actually mean it's made out of the precious metal which I only found out today that's not to say that they don't feel sturdy and because they definitely are but make no mistake the E2 was definitely a cheaper option sold alongside Palm cellular pdas at the time having half the CPU clock speed and an eighth the amount of onboard storage when compared to the 150 more expensive T5 model the company that owned these seemed to have put custom backgrounds for each of their employees or perhaps they were just naming the pdas hi there John the next one also seems to fire up fine and let's give a warm welcome to Brendan and surprisingly the last one of these seemingly has no problems as well g'day Kevin and as Akita I always wanted one of these and now I have three but now I realize there isn't actually that much you can do with them while Palm pdas were running their own OS devices such as the HP ipac RX 1950 were running Windows mobile I happened to get sent this by a viewer all the way from Austria who bought this PDA back in 2005. I might even make a video about this in the future thanks Alexander for sending this over this was one of hp's cheapest pdas at the time with one including cellular capability costing literally twice as much it appears to have arrived safely all the way from Europe and being a budget device it does feel a bit cheaper noticeably due to the plastic casing I did try setting the language to English yet it still seems to be in German a language which I can't speak although I actually am of German descent and there are some games on here such as properly in 2006 Nokia released the n73 a smartphone with lots of multimedia functionality the obsolescence of traditional pdas loomed ever closer with better and better displays cameras cellular functionality in a compact size there was a lot to like about this generation of phones Nokia in particular made a big push for decent phone Optics this rear camera is 3.2 megapixels pretty good for the time and having a front-facing camera enabled video calls to be possible and for those that still etched for a qwerty keyboard Blackberry had you covered even Nokia offered a qwerty keyboard with their touchscreen focused n97 I just wish the battery didn't become a spicy pillow and by 2010 smartphones had well and truly taken over the big glass touchscreen slab and lack of physical keyboard would go on to dominate the landscape tool this very day Apple was sort of on the right track with their Neutron handhelds back in the 90s but now there is no need for expensive attachments smartphones really have it all collecting pdas isn't too expensive either as there isn't much you can really do them now the later ones had built-in batteries and can be pretty problematic as a result if you do have some lying around be sure to remove all the batteries if possible even those Button cell backup batteries can leak the PDA still exists today well you may have seen one of these devices the super 9988 electronic dictionary it has most of the applications and tools you'd expect from a traditional PDA and I remember always being curious as to what these were back in high school many Japanese exchange students would be using them thank you so much for watching I used to be obsessed with these things especially pdas that look like little laptops and I hope you've enjoyed the video and I really had a good time looking back at some of these old personal data assistance pdas I think that's what I think that's what they stand for anyway thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video [Music] thank you

Channel: Psivewri

Views: 167,134

Keywords: psivewri, 4k, eucalyptus, oil, australia, tech, PDA, pocket, computer, personal, digital, assistant, palmtop, history, rise and fall, PDAs, technology, vintage, testing, review, radio shack ec-21, Psion 3A, Sharp ZQ-650, Apple, apple emate 300, Palm, Palm III, 5MX, netbook, Nokia, smartphones, old, N97, N73, phones, documentary, demonstration, computers, portable

Id: meaJrLtpZK8

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023