When they started to
appear, I became attracted to
electronic organizers, and this one first caught my eye. This is a
Sharp OZ-9600 organizer. That is a 6-inch ruler in front of it, so you
can see it is not exactly compact. It's heavy, too. Still, it is pretty
well-equipped - touch screen, nice little keyboard, and all the good
features. Note areas, calendar, alarms, phone directory, expense
keeper, it will sync with a PC, everything. Very cool, but only 128K of
memory, so stuff has to be purged now and then to free up memory. I
outgrew it pretty quickly, and the touch screen was always a bit
difficult for me; I'm no better at using a stylus than I am a pen. It
eventually led to:
This one, also a
Sharp, is a YO-520P. This one is
smaller, lighter, and packs 1M of memory. No touch display, everything
operates from the keyboard. The keyboard is smaller, but still usable.
All the features of the old OZ. Served me well. I aspired to the Palm OS, which I really liked, but still had the stylus issues.
Finally, this showed up:
This is the Dana,
made by AlphaSmart. It appeared in
2002, and I had to have it. It uses the Palm OS (you may be able to see
the Palm desktop in the middle of the screen) with all the regular Palm
functions, but gives total control from it's laptop-sized keyboard.
This thing is the ultimate - Palm OS with all its goodies, plus an
optional software called QuickOffice which gives me the option to
create, import and edit, save, and export Word and Excel documents,
while using the wide screen to give me a 80columnX12line display. It
has two slots for SD cards so I can have a potload of storage, USB
connection to a PC for syncing, and the usual Palm infrared thingie, so
it can "beam" stuff to other Palm devices, or I can print directly to
my infrared-equipped printer. Runs about 70 hours on a charge. I'm back
to carrying that small laptop case, but that's not an issue. 
In striving for portability, I have another goodie to carry in the pocket: a Palm Tungsten E2. I can, of course, sync with the Dana at any time, and can still carry my Dana in the backpack. Yes, it is redundant, but what the hey. I like it.
Calculators:
I've had a bunch of calculators over the years, and most of them have gone on to calculator afterlife, but there is one that stays the course:
This is the ultimate
calculator, the Texas Instruments
TI-95 PROCALC. It is a programmable scientific calculator, probably the
closest thing, in its day, to a handheld computer. It is a cool tool.
One of the coolest features is a socket on the side for cartridges. (a
cart is beside the 6 inch ruler in the pic) I have four carts: 8K
RAM, chemical engineering library, mathematics library, and statistics
library. With the pocket-protector geek crowd, this thing still
commands respect. These days, it sits on my desk and balances the
checkbook; a sad fate for such an incredible machine, but that's what I
do with it...Other toys:
There are some other toys, including portable ham radio gear, that are not covered here, but here are a couple of notable others:
The AlphaSmart Pro.
This came along in 1995, and was
intended for school use, but I found it useful to have one for my own.It is essentially a portable word processor, with 8 file areas that hold about 8K each. It is light, reliable, rugged, and runs about 500 hours on a set of AA cells. A cool thing. I carried this thing around for several years, and it still works fine. It is a bit cumbersome; it won't feed a printer directly, and the memory must be dumped into a PC to print it. This is done by starting your word processor on the PC, hooking a cable from the AlphaSmart to the keyboard port on the PC, and the AlphaSmart just pipes the memory into the PC in keyboard form, at about 30 cps. It's interesting to watch the first couple of times, but gets old quickly. It is, however, portable.
I now have:
the Newer
Model, the AlphaSmart 3000, which has
more storage and USB connection to a PC. Still runs about 600 hours on
a set of AA batteries. Very cool.Another one stands out, and I still consider this one a pioneer:
This is an NEC
Ultralite, a ground-breaker IMHO. The main unit is about 12X10X1", and
at under a pound, incredibly light.When I saw this thing, I thought I was looking at the future, in the form of silicone storage, and I turned out to be right; witness today's handhelds. The "hard drive" is 2M of RAM which it handles like a hard drive, only much faster - the ultimate RAMDrive. It included an outboard 3.5" DD floppy drive, shown in the picture. It has a stripped-down version of MS-DOS 3.3 in ROM, so it's instant-on. It also includes a crude version of LapLink, to control the built-in 300 baud modem. It did not, however, include a text editor, so that must be loaded in the 2M "hard drive", but I have one called Galaxy Lite that works well. You won't do any desktop publishing with it, but it does basic text just fine. This was also my first PDA; I kept a little DOS calendar app and phone directory on it, and carried my UltraLite for a couple of years. Its RAM, of course was volatile, but it had a backup battery that would keep the RAM alive for about 72 hours on a charge. I charged it every night. The NiCad backup battery is bad now, and won't keep the thing up, but I still use it from time to time as a portable packet radio controller; I just keep it plugged up...