The History Of Tiny Computers (PDAs) - Where Did They Go?
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- Опубліковано 19 кві 2023
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Personal digital assistants, PDAs, palmtops and pocket computers used to be very popular. But where did they go? Let's take a trip back in time and explore the history of those tiny computers :) #PDA #technology #history
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Nathan Sivewright
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PDAs and pocket computers featured:
Radio Shack EC-21 (1978)
Psion 3A - 1991 (3A, 1995)
Sharp ZQ-650 - 1997
Apple eMate 300 - 1997
Palm III - 1998
Psion 5MX - 1999
Palm VX - 1999
Psion Teklogix Netbook Pro - 2003
Palm Tungsten E2 - 2005
HP iPaq RX1950 - 2005
Nokia N73 - 2006
Blackberry 9000 - 2008
Nokia N97 Mini - 2009
Music Used:
"Soaring" "Past Sadness"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b... - Наука та технологія
Thanks for watching! I hope you enjoyed this style of video. More content on its way soon :) - Nathan
Overview was fine but as the video is short, I was missing more in-depth presentation of what it could do but again, Understand. Maybe tip for future, took some iPaq and install on it few games from Archive. if I remember, there were few titles for Windows Mobile that were fun (Pocket Ever quest or Quake III Arena).
thanks for the content
you should have mentioned the King of the PDA's the HTC HD2
it rocked 1ghz 512mb storage and ram windows mobile 6.5 and got a port of basicly any handheld os ever
I used a Palm III or a Palm Pilot (don't recall exactly but looked similar to the one in your video). I think I still have it in a box somewhere.
gpd win max 2 is rlly cool :D
I still remember getting my 5MX, I felt like I was living in the future. It was almost entire useless, but that didn't stop me loving it.
How my parents feel about me lol
@@julioibarra7156damn
That sliding keyboard was just the coolest thing
You can get a new version of the mpsion from planet computers.
How quickly we all forgot what it was like carrying around a phone, and iPod and a PDA all separately! We knew no different, and it was peak personal technology at the time. I remember using the HP iPaq RX1950. I feel as though they must have been a common model in their time, but man was it ever useful to have one of them. Always enjoy your videos Psivewri!
When I got my first, "big boy job," my wife bought me a Handspring Visor Prism as a gift...since I needed to do adult things like have a calender, and contact book, and a paper organizer just wouldn't cut it. I played a lot of SimCity on that thing! I even got the cellular modem Springboard and remember showing off getting my emails to a friend at the bar. He was like, "wow, now your work can bother you even on your day off!"
Your friend must be someone from the future 😂😂😂😂
Cut to 2024, where nothing stops work from bugging you on your day off!
I remember around the year 2001, one of the local doctors where I worked had a pda with the plastic pen and he was constantly using it for phone contacts, and other uses. To him, it was a neat gadget that served its purpose at the time. I did not have one, but he used it all the time.
I'd add the Casio Cassiopeia to this list. I had an A-11 with 4MB RAM, manufactured somewhere between 1996 and 1999, and used it up to 2009: it was a great companion to take quick notes and transfer them back to the PC through a serial cable (at least until serial ports where a thing on PCs). Great memories.
I got a second hand Palm m505 back in 2007 with a faulty battery and it was still a blast to use until it got stolen during my last year of middle school, a month or so ago I got a Tungsten T3 and it's more or less the same but much more capable as it can actually play MP3 and videos at 240p, the charm of the Palm really comes to the very unique software created for it from MS-DOS clone games to full fledged remote apps.
I have a tungsten E2 myself
That was Palm OS - I always liked it as well. At the time, it was competing with Windows CE Pocket PC devices.
I had a Palm Tungsten T myself and loved it. It was nothing more than a glorified diary but back in the early 00's, it was the "cool" factor of having a PDA which counted. Once the iPhone came along in 2007, it basically rendered all PDAs useless.
Did a lot of gaming on my Tungsten T3. Space Trader, some choice RPGs. Games were pricy though. So are games today, and they probably would've died out if not for all the IAP/microtransactions, + ads. :\
I still collect the old PalmOS and Windows Mobile devices. Always fascinated by them as a kid, I was lucky to have a Zire 21, and later as I got older was able to collect all the Tungsten T and E series phones, lots of WM5 and WM6 devices as well. My first Palm device was the Palm IIIe, and I now have the IIIc in my collection. Love your videos!! Should do more on PalmOS!!
I beg you to show off your collection 😬
Palm did some innovative things, until Microsoft muscled in to kill them off.
I got a palm tungsten t3
I just bought the TX, very nice!
It is compatible with 10.4 Tiger on the 2008 iMac 17"
After rebuilding the battery packs on both my IPAQ 3950 and 3630 i still use them regularly as their battery last way longer than my phones so they are super useful for using as digital notepads or for reading off scripts. I also have a 3830 but its so similar to the 3950 i just stripped it for parts to fix the other one.
That’s so cool! I love the idea of using older technology in the modern era since they still could be useful to some degree!
I love that you reflect on these evolutionary dead ends, I had a couple fo PDA's from Casio and Palm even when they were new I just had a feeling that they were somewhat pointless and sold them on after awhile.
But they evolved into Smartphones! I went from Atari Portfolio to Palm to Windows CE to "Pocket PC Phone Edition" to Windows Phone to iPhone. None of these was pointless for me, nothing was a dead end.
The first iPhone killed the PDA market when it launched in 2007. It made a basic handheld computing device (converged with a cellphone), mainstream, popular, and far more affordable than the exotically overpriced PDA models the big OEMs were selling as corporate/prosumer productivity tools.
Apple was the nail in the coffin for the traditional PDA market.
But HP, Dell, Acer, and all the rest of the big OEMs had already poisoned and suffocated the PDA market with their own diseases. Too greedy, too anti-consumer, too much DRM, too often, for too long. Their heavyhanded proprietary software and hardware controls were so excessive that even the dinosaur corporate customers quickly abandoned fleets of these machines for mainstream consumer replacements.
I used a Dell X51v for years. With aftermarket memory and processor upgrades. I loved that little machine. Although, of course, I was part of the enthusiast minority who preferred "PPC" over the loathsome term "PDA".
Still, I was happy to finally see a giant blunder into the corrupt PDA market and smash the old paradigm apart. It was already past time for it to evolve or die.
@@pwnmeisterageThe first iPhone launched in 2007.
@@OrangeUp1st gen iPhone launched in US on 29 June 2007. And broke records by selling almost half a million units on release day.
@@pwnmeisterage I wrote this just bc upstairs you said it launched in 2009.
@9:06 is in Korean, and I think is for korean electronics EMF approval/registration. By the way, Palm Pilot was incredibly popular in US in the 90's, and I worked at a computer store and had a lot of customers buying them. Later, I bought the Handspring, a popular clone of Palm Pilot series, with additional cell phone module, so it was like one of the pioneer of modern smart phone.
Glad to see someone pointing it out, it is indeed a Korean EMF approval sticker
The two characters on the top left of the sticker is in Chinese/Kanji though, strange.
@sengyew83 While Korean language system has Hangul for their writing/reading system, lot of words are still technically in Chinese(한자/Hanja).
Nowdays, they're almost always written in Hangul but back in as late as early 2000's, you're able to find some words written in Chinese here and there.
@@juny5531 thanks!
While familiar with the ancient usage of Chinese script (and later disuse) in Korea, I never knew it was still present as recent as the 2000s.
I think Handspring was an offshoot created by the original founders of Palm, after they left the original company.
You and I grew up in the same era. I remembered every single one of those PDAs and actually owned a Sharp, Palm III, IPAQ and the N73! I was also obsessed. So funny you mentioned the Japanese e-dictionary. We used to host Japanese exchange students and I always wanted to mess with their e-dictionaries! Thanks for the good bit of nostalgia.
Never thought you'd show such Public Displays of Affection Psivewri! What a throwback this video was! Cheers for the memories! 🤣
And now the term "personal digital assistant" is transforming to just "digital assistant", and now it's in a completely different form (as a built in assistant and AI chatbot in the phone and computer)
The time flies
Your collection of vintage tech is quite impressive! It would be great to see a walk-through of your collection and what you've acquired so far.
Excellent video as always! ☺️
I remember seeing a bloopers roll from a TV show with Brian Blessed as the presenter, struggling to use a 'Palm Pilot' to follow the shows running order. The studio producer keeps reminding him to 'Look at the Palm Pilot' to which he responds: 'Palm pilot? That sounds like the name for a w&nking machine!' 🤣
I still have a Goldstar H-120, not used anymore however.
I was a technical writer at Apple for a few years, and casually knew Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinski before they left to start Palm, Inc. and later Handspring. We had a couple Palm Pilots at home, and later Handsprings, my favorite, and eventually a Sony Clie that my wife favored.
Now pretty much all the functions are rolled into your smart phone, and better functionally, to boot.
I remember the Apple eMate 300 back around 1998 when my high school in Darwin provided them for us seniors to work on our essays. I thought they were so super futuristic looking.
I went to the launch of the Nokia N95 in Melbourne when I worked at Vodafone as a 29-something. That was my first true smart phone after owning an O2 windows mobile PDA/Phone. The N95 really changed up what I could do with 3G. Loved that thing!
I got that Psion 3a used as a gift when I was 14 or so. It came with a great Basic environment, „OPL Basic“ IRC, so I wrote a silly little side-scrolling shooter during the holidays. 1:24
Listening to you start up the Apple Newton, I am curious do you live next door to an aviary? I live in the UK and if that is the natural sound of birdlife in in Aus then you are a lucky young man.!!!
I'm not that old, and I know about PDAs. They're honestly pretty cool, but today, your phone is basically that and more. I have an old Sony Clie that my parents used to use.
the psion teklogix reminds me a lot the nokia booklet 3G of 2009. Always liked those, you should try and find one to review! maybe it could even be functional in 2023 with an ssd, ram upgrade and linux installed
When I was in Japan, there where buckets and buckets full of PDAs in the Hard-Off stores for just under 50 cents.
There where a few "high end" models there too, but again they're super cheap.
Japan is a country that really loves its electronic gadgets.
Brilliant video! I remember being so facinated by these as a kid.
about Electronic Dictionaries (or でんしじしょ "Denshi Jisho" in japanese) I recently brought one to help me study the language, kinda clunky to use in my opinion but really good once you get used to it (surely way better than google translate)
I watch your videos daily and love every single one of them. Thank you
Great video! When I was younger PDA’s were the best I was obsessed!
Man I love this video already it's talking about my favourite thing tech😁 good on ya keep up the good work
As an engineer student during the early 2000s to me, the best handheld computing device was one of three options, the HP48(S, G, GX) calculator or the Texas TI 82 and 92 calculators. The 3 are programmable graphing calculators, they had amazing communities of users sharing all kind of software in it. Among my class mates we had HP48s and we had games in it, and a lot more software, and it was just a 4 bit CPU.
I loved Psions. I had a 3a when I was a student and wrote loads of my essays on it.
Good video. But an important missing PDA for me is the “Zoomer” (Casio Z-PDA), an x86-based PDA that ran PC/GEOS and completed with the Newton. Great device, I still have one. I also have its cellphone descendant, the Nokia Communicator 9000.
I love your videos really informative 😊
I had a classmate who had many of the palms you showed today. Great video as always! Thank you!
brings me lots of memories, thanks
Great little retrospective/collection show and tell
Awesome video!!
I had two Dell palm devices. I got movies and games on it. Great fun and it was futuristic at the time. Then I got a Psion organiser. It had flash memory that you could use once. You couldn’t overwrite 😊
12:34 maaaaaan seeing the n73 brought back so many memories
It was the phone that really got me into photography
Palm Tungsten E was my first PDA and I loved the heck out of that thing!
05:56 Sorry Nathan, I lost it here 😂😂
Thanks, this was very interesting.
please never change the music at the end - I really enjoy it every time if it is there.
Awesome vid mate
Great review love your work true legend never forgot 🥰
I had palms and handspring visors. I still have a couple. I loved it for work for my calendar and notes I did for my mental health clients. It was great for the time, and I still miss how well the calendar functioned.
I always loved PDAs growing up. I started wish a Casio SF-5590SY (still got it). Used it quite a bit, even if I thought it was really limited. Then in high school I upgraded to a Casio BE-300. I LOVED that thing! I got it because I found there was a mod available for it called Bee-OS or something along those lines. Made it run a much more stock Windows 3.0 experience then what it came with. I had so much fun installing all these different applications and games for Windows CE. I remember playing emulators up to the 16 bit consoles, watching movies, playing mp3s... it was awesome. Nowadays I have a collection of other ones I had wanted back then, like the HP Jornada 720. So yeah, as you could probably tell I enjoyed the video!
Very cool. I also enjoy your selection of watches.
Very nice video!
I started collecting these on ebay as soon as I could afford it. Wanted them since I was a 90s kid and smartphones just didn't hit the same way.
I use an Hp620lx Palmtop for writing stories, and a Palm Tungsten E2 for handheld games & ebooks.
These are amazing. I still have my Handspring Visor with me and I love it.
I used a Handspring Visor PDA back in the day. Loved it.
they still make little laptops, the gpd win series is great and their is the one gx1 which looks like a tiny alienware laptop
Another interesting old video.
Well done, Psivewri
great vid! ive been watching since year four, now im in year six!
I remember stores selling generic ones made with transparent plastic in different colors. I wonder if any of those still exist.
Great video, and I had a chepo Casio PDA in high school, and a Palm M100 PDA back in the early 00's I had gotten used, and loved them for what they where using my Palm M100 for a few years with a snap on keyboard attachment to take notes in meetings with one of my first real jobs out of high school before I could afford a decent enough Netbook for the task, and as long as I remember to sync it with my PC each day, and recharge the AA's it was all good.
These days I feel the closest we get to a PDA that are not our phones, are tablets with a keyboard attachment, which have gotten so good for the money on the Android side that if you shop right, they can handle most if not all the compute needs of a lot of people, and I feel for some PDA makers back in the day, that was their ultimate goal. 👍
3:33 look at that little space shuttle there I guess it was built from the space shuttle people. 1981-2011
if i recall the Psion 5 series was rebranded by Ericsson and sold as the Ericsson Mc 218 , still have the Sony Clie` pda nx-70 which ran the palm os , used it as a mp3 player back in college .. surprisingly , the battery for it still can be found
this is nice i like seeing videos like this i didn't have a PDA at all as i didn't know what they were in early 2000
I had a Palm Treo with the keyboard. I loved it
Love technology, especially old.
There was a time when everyone wanted a palm device, and so many companies were licensing the OS. In college, I worked for a shop that gave all he employees Windows mobile devices. We had these infrared printers to print out invoices when we were on site. I ended up using it for emulators. 😂 they were cool but it was missing that wireless data component we are so dependent on today.
My childe hood in 15 min and my obsession with PDA’s thanks man that was a blast of the past! Loved it
Amazing talent true legend never forgot love older tech great review ❤
As always, great video
I went to Japan in 2019 and PDA are still a thing over there, I went to that huge electronics store chain they have there and one entire floor of the department was dedicated to PDAs there must've been at least 50 different models on display brand new.
Yeah I was obsessed with PDA's that looked like little laptops back then too... and ACTUAL little laptops too for that matter.
Dude! it is one of the best video. I like the making. it is similar to 8 bit guy. Hats off!
As a kid I was also obsessed with PDAs. I had a Palm IIIxe, Palm Vx, Casio EM-500 to name a few. I was part of a ton of online community forums and chat rooms about them too. I think my last PDA was a cell phone version of the Palm Treo.
Ahoy, thanks for the fun look back. I worked as a network tech (mostly OS/2) for HP until 2006. I was lucky and got a free HP Jornada 720 palmtop with the StrongARM cpu. It ran WinCE 3.11. I mostly used it to keep my schedule and jot down notes. In 2010 a "house guest" decided to rob me at 2AM. He took anything electronic including my palmtop. Today I have 2 Venturer 10.1 tablets with keyboards docks, 4+64G, and an N4000 CPU with UHD600 igpu running Win10 and upgradeable to Win11. Much more useful even though I'm retired... Keep the vids coming please. Cheers, daveyb
Omg I was obsessed with PDAs as a kid, my dad gave me loads of hand me downs. My fave was the revo, I remember taking it to school with me when I was like 10 😂
I myself picked up three Palm handhelds like 5-7 years ago.
One of them is the T3 which is probably the best but from its form factor, I actually fell more nostalgic for earlier monochrome models.
It's true there is not much that can be done with these these days but I love the cradle mine came with.
There are a number of games you can play on old Palm PDAs both the monochrome, and color ones, I used to play Tetris, and Mahjong on my Palm M100 killing time at work, while looking like I was still working at my desk. 😅
@@CommodoreFan64 I had a couple way back in the day actually but getting that weird PalmOS Simulator from back then to work was always weird 👀
Bro i got a tungsten t3
the PSION 2 was great, I even used it for college from 1996-2002 to plan out my work. And it was great because the reminders would go off when it was sleeping, and the 9 volt battery worked for as much as 6 months.
I always wanted a psion so it was cool to see many different ones featured here! My handspring visor deluxe was fun back in the day tho.
4:55 Did my Bachelors & Masters theses on an eMate. Great little machine. Especially with the tripod stand for fieldwork. Keyboard a little small but definitely usable once you got used to it & could type away on the daily 3h bus commutes to College. Bought a network card & adaptor & managed to find a department printer from the library and print remotely. That was a big deal & nobody was doing this in '98/'99. Also soldered & pinned out the serial port (I think) to get it to sync to a Windows 98 PC at home. That was actually easier to do compared to when we bought our first iMac due to it going to USB. Crazy times. Still works when plugged into the mains but have been meaning to rebuild the battery with 4 rechargeable AAs soldered together. One of these days...
I had the Psion Revo and even connected it via IR to download my emails while traveling. My dad had the Series 5 and was always proud to send some holiday mails from his camping trips over the IR from his Nokia 8210. Simpler times, but we always tried many things to stay connected to friends and family via helpfull devices, to get around the high SMS costs.
I wanna be honest , as a 90s kid i still love those AAA & AA Rechargeable Batteries because we don't have user replaceable batteries these days , and the abundance of AAs & AAAs is also a plus point
when i was about 12, a friend and i went to look around a charter school building that hadn’t been used in years, and we found the front doors unlocked. naturally, we went inside. most of the doors inside were locked, but there was one door that wasn’t, and it happened to be a printing/electronic storage room. on the shelf was a couple palm tungsten e2’s and i decided to take one. there were also a couple of monstrously huge laptops that i was very tempted to take, but decided to leave them behind. i mostly used it for playing games, and listening to music since i didn’t have an mp3 player.
a few weeks later, we went back to that school, and found the doors locked, so someone definitely found out that we were snooping around in there, but we never got in trouble for it. which was a bit surprising since it was, and is, an incredibly small town, and it wouldn’t have been very hard to figure out it was us, since there’s less that 4000 people there.
it’s been almost a decade since then, but i recently bought a sync cable, and it still works perfectly, though i am considering replacing the battery.
i obviously regret stealing it, to an extent, and could have gotten in a huge amount of trouble, but i really did enjoy using it back then
Brilliant video, mate. I absolutely LOVED my PDAs, especially my Newton. Now if I could only get MacOS to run on a Planet Computers Astro Slide…might make a good video!
so happy you did this, this is a subject that there are not many videos about. But i love watching computer chronicles ep,s about tiny computers.....bcuz if u was rich in the 80s thats the ultimate tech must have...and there so cool looking...my friends son just bought a 8086 kit off line and he's 14....and I myself am working on a project to add real retro operating system thats connected to your virtual reality home, u can use in VR...and transfer files from your desktop to a Virtual Reality Computer in a computer in a computer...he he he
I still have a tungsten e2, I used it back in college back in 2010, my family didn't have a lot of money to buy me a new calculator so my mom bought a used tungsten e2 and I installed a scientific calculator software on it, but this one I could install games so that was my gaming device in between classes, lost the CD and the wifi card, recently installed palm desktop in windows 11 and the bluetooth sync still works. Thanks for the memories
Nice! You should also try one of the phones in the Nokia Communicator series, mostly the 9110 or 9000, because they can run DOS apps!
7:19 Brings back memories. I read entire books on that green 160x160 display. %)
I got Palm 3 as a child from my aunt who lives in USA since her childhood and I had no idea how to use it since I didn't know english at all back then, but looking back I rly hope I can find it and explore it now.
Pilot was bought by U.S. Robotics, then it was bought by 3Com, then spun off, then bought by HP.
I have numerous Palm OS devices over the years, starting with the Pilot 1000, then Palm II, IIIc, and also numerous Windows CE, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile devices as well. Never owned a Sharp, Psion, Newton etc, but knew of them. Also used HP scientific calculators with some PDA like programs so no need for a Sharp digital diary at the time. Thanks for your video. I still have a few devices, but sold most of them before, some died or broke as well.
With today’s processing power, screens etc. it would be great to see this form factor make a come back.
The Psion S3 was such a great device for the time. Used one for a while back in the day.
I love the PDAs. Loved them since I was a child. My uncle had a Nokia 9110, later a 9210i. When I was older, like 11, 12 ears old, I found a HP Jornada 720 on a second hand shop for like 5€. That was awesome and my entry into handheld/computing :) I went on and collected these things. Later XDA IIi etc.. it was great, I had a lot of fun.
I remember that I used to have a Casio PDA which had a diary, date and calculator function. It was pretty cool for its time to say so myself
Great video. I still use my Palm Vx.. but my favorite PDAs were my Philips Nino's.. one monochrome and one colour. Even got a Linux kernel to run on them once..
If I had a PDA now, I'd use it for notes, todo list, calculator, calendar, etc... and it would be good companion to a flip phone, for those who are now ditching their smart phones for many different reasons
Quite a good selection of old pdas. Maybe something for the computer museum. 😊
HTC made a cool PDA/Pocket PC. Great episode. Thank you.
You should do a video on graphing calculators!
I liked the Psion 3 constructs. Still do. The Psion 5 was another path somehow and wasn't the same. After that they required power beyond 2 AA batteries and whatnot.
My parents always had PDAs when i was growing up, and whenever they would get a new one, they always gave me the old one. Wish i would've kept them. Id spend hours playing Bejeweled
Yeah, the handspring Visor is the one glaring omission. Got me through grad school, and was really the first workable smartphone when someone introduced a cell phone cartridge for the springboard slot.
Its amazing to see these devices still work today. Their build quality was really good.