Did YOU have a PDA?

For 20 years the Personal Digital Assistant was THE management gizmo, until the smartphone came along and ate its lunch!

So let's look back at the early days of the pocket office revolution. Bring your stylus...
Pocket tech took a big step forward in the 1970s via the humble calculator, and one model in particular: the 1974 Hewlett Packard HP-65. It was the world's first programmable handheld calculator thanks to a magnetic card reader that let you load and save programmes.
Six years later the revolution took another step forward with the Sharp PC-1211. This was a 'pocket computer' with a QUERTY keyboard and 24 character LCD that supported BASIC programming. Tandy rebadged the 1211 as the TRS-80 PC1 for the American market.
Pocket computers were really long programmable calculators, but in 1982 Hewlett Packard introduced a novel feature on its HP-75 model: an appointments scheduler.

And with a built-in alarm as well as a text editor the seeds of the Personal Digital Assistant had been planted...
Then in 1984 Psion launched the Organiser: a pocket computer with a scheduler and a database in a rugged design. For the first time you could store contact details, organise your diary, do calculations and run simple programmes on the go. Battery life was measured in months.
The Psion Organiser 2, launched in 1986, included an operating system, a programming language and a RS232 port for connecting to other systems. It was widely used by businesses for stock control, quality inspection and currency calculations.

Handheld computing was taking off...
By 1989 the handheld market was starting to split in two. One branch led to the palmtops: IBM PC compatible sub-laptops such as the Poquet PC and the Atari Portfolio. Simple, light and rugged the Portfolio was the PC John Connor used to hack ATMs with in Terminator 2.
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