 This is the SF Productions Podcast Network. Hey, no PDA in the halls! From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mark. You can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics on iTunes, or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. I'm taking this solo as Mindy's out of town, plus it's a particularly geeky entry. We've become so accustomed to those small plastic rectangles in our lives, which provide all possible information, it's easy to forget the days before iPhones and Androids, when you had a separate device that provided calendar, contacts, and notes, as well as some primitive games. That, my friend, was a personal data assistant, or PDA. Now, these started as analog notebooks with specialty stationary inserts, the Day Planner. You could go to a physical store at what the ancients called a mall, and buy all sorts of different inserts, no respectable up-and-coming manager like me could be without one. You can still find hipsters using them today. Now, you see, there's a calendar type thing here. There's a calendar. There's where you'd put your notes. There's a whole thing. I never used the contacts thing because it was too much of a hassle. Here's a thing with more notes, projects I was working on, you know, various things, and you would just carry that around with you all day. Now, there were also fledgling unit askers that looked like a calculator, but with a huge amount of manual data entry, you could store your contact info and appointments. Some would even simulate telephone touch-tones. You'd hold the unit up to your analog phone, and it would dial the number for you. Then, there was a whole line of gadgety watches that would store and display phone numbers and contact info. Timex had the data link with the ability to enter info on your computer via their app, and then beam the info to your watch via flashes on the screen. Unfortunately, this only worked with old-style CRT monitors. The advent of the flat screen killed that method. It was very geeky, so of course I had one. There were also early cell phones with the ability to store such info, but again, it involved a huge amount of manual data entry using these tiny keyboards. You basically had to use your thumb print or something, a thumbnail. Then we reached the age of the true PDA, a device with a similar shape to our modern phones except with little or no ability to communicate outside of a USB cable. Now, we're excluding mobile computers such as the Scion units and the mini laptops as they were aimed more at general computer use. The first and probably premature PDA was the Apple Newton from 1992. The size of a large paperback book had a monochrome screen and provided a form of handwriting recognition as seen in a Simpsons episode. It was more of a curiosity than anything. Now, 1997 brought us the first popular PDA, the Palm Pilot. It was originally owned by US Robotics, remember them? And then 3Com before going off on their own. I first saw this the trade show and I just fell in love with it buying an early unit. Consists of a large LCD screen with a section to accept the form of handwriting input, really a simplified version of the alphabet, along with a few buttons at the bottom and a stylus that docked inside, which you would inevitably lose. It was popular in my family, a few of them in my tech museum. This is a color unit from much later in the line. As you see, it has the same basic design as a few buttons at the bottom. It actually had a slot for a memory card and you would store basic information on it. Now, one of the reasons Palm became so popular is that it licensed a tech to anyone who wanted to build one. This is a handspring visor, a palm clone with the ability to accept specialty cartridges. As you might guess, this made a unit into a GPS, but it's still the same basic design. Now, here's a unit Sony made called the Clier. Unfortunately, the cover that kind of flipped over it has long been removed there, but it did have a camera built into it in the back and in this case, the buttons were kind of hidden down here at the bottom, but it was still the same basic design. Now, this is the Cadillac of Palm Units and one I used for years as Sony Clier. I was a huge Sony fan for years until they lost their way. It's a flip PDA with a full keyboard, a rotating screen and a cartridge slot with a camera built in. There's a cartridge slot there and then there was a camera that was on this rotating thing so you could actually rotate it around and shoot it from different directions and all this. But I love the idea that you had a full actual physical keyboard which you really didn't have unless you bought these weird add-on units. I think we actually had one that kind of folded into a... unfolded into a full keyboard. But see, here's all the general buttons you would have before and you could run it pretty much as a traditional, you know, PDA or you could actually have a kind of tablet thing. Of course, it has always had a stylus and as always, it's gone. It also used Sony's infamous proprietary memory sticks. Now, this was a format that I actually invested in because I had invested into Sony a lot but it was absolutely proprietary. This one was designed specifically for these units, I believe because it had extra encryption on it or some sort of deal. I'm not sure what the deal was there. Then there was a unit called the Tapwave Zodiac, a palm designed for gaming with enhanced graphics. I almost bought this one over the Sony unit and as you can see, it's much more of a gaming unit. Palm ruled the PDA market for several years and then the whole PDA market evaporated with the introduction of the iPhone. Palm tried to pivot into making their own phones. It was called the Trio, but it was a little too late. They pivoted again into selling an operating system called WebOS but it never caught on. HP bought them and then TCL bought them and today you can buy a Palm companion device that acts like a simplified add-on to your actual phone but looks much more like one of these original PDAs. Back in the day, I carried around three devices at work. My StarTac phone, my pager, and my Palm Pilot. That's all been replaced by one of those plastic rectangles that does everything. Now you can check out our audio podcast How I Got My Wife to Read Comics on iTunes or on our website SFPodcastNetwork.com From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mark. Thanks for watching. Now I've got to play some SimCity.