The History Of Tiny Computers (PDAs) - Where Did They Go?
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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...
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'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 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 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. :\
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 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"
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
@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.
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.
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!' 🤣
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! 🤣
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 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.
Man I love this video already it's talking about my favourite thing tech😁 good on ya keep up the good work
I loved Psions. I had a 3a when I was a student and wrote loads of my essays on it.
I had a classmate who had many of the palms you showed today. Great video as always! Thank you!
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
Brilliant video! I remember being so facinated by these as a kid.
Great little retrospective/collection show and tell
Great video! When I was younger PDA’s were the best I was obsessed!
Palm Tungsten E was my first PDA and I loved the heck out of that thing!
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 watch your videos daily and love every single one of them. Thank you
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. 👍
I had a Palm Treo with the keyboard. I loved it
12:34 maaaaaan seeing the n73 brought back so many memories It was the phone that really got me into photography
please never change the music at the end - I really enjoy it every time if it is there.
My childe hood in 15 min and my obsession with PDA’s thanks man that was a blast of the past! Loved it
brings me lots of memories, thanks
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!
I love your videos really informative 😊
I used a Handspring Visor PDA back in the day. Loved it.
Very cool. I also enjoy your selection of watches.
These are amazing. I still have my Handspring Visor with me and I love it.
The Psion S3 was such a great device for the time. Used one for a while back in the day.
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.
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.
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.
Great review love your work true legend never forgot 🥰
Amazing talent true legend never forgot love older tech great review ❤
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.
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
My 1st one was a Casio Cassiopeia back in 98. It had a full PCMCIA slot, and ran MS Dos 5. My 2nd one was an upgraded model with a full color display!
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.
great vid! ive been watching since year four, now im in year six!
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.
Awesome vid mate
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 😂
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
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
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
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
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!
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.
Another interesting old video. Well done, Psivewri
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!
Its amazing to see these devices still work today. Their build quality was really good.
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..
What a walk down memory lane! I was doing IT for small tech companies in this era. I only got to play with a Newton once. My roommate had it. He said he loved it, but it really wasn't that useful. I still wanted it. I got to play with the emate300 at the a store. They really wanted to target an education market, but it was too expensive. I think I still have my Palm V. I tell people all the time it basically saved my undiagnosed ADHD life. Love that device. I remember the Handspring coming out, first PDA with cell service (with an add-on piece of hardware)! I wanted one SO badly. I could I have a Tungsten, too, that I got as a teaching program for elementary kids using Palm handhelds. I also got to play with the HP one (an exec had it). I need to pull them all out and boot them up again. I did a few years ago for my kids and they all still worked, but with terrible battery life.
Thanks, this was very interesting.
Dude! it is one of the best video. I like the making. it is similar to 8 bit guy. Hats off!
7:19 Brings back memories. I read entire books on that green 160x160 display. %)
Ahhh.. this Besta CyberDict 5 Titanium sound at the end triggered memory. My is still working :-)
Quite a good selection of old pdas. Maybe something for the computer museum. 😊
As always, great video
yoooooo after cars we got a new arc: PDAs. love to see it.
Awesome video!!
The nearest thing I had was an Amstrad NC100 notepad which I used for writing. It was a handy portable unit to carry about, but the only way to export your text was via a cable, and only in a very basic way which lost all your formatting. I still love typing on little networks.
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
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.
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.
In 2003-4, my job had a Symbol scanner for inventory. It was Palm III based, and I used it for some VERY basic web access during work hours.
I would love to see a review on a PocketMail I used it so much when travelling late 99 early 2000's. Do all your typing offline, then hold the back up to a payphone and sail a certain number, all would be sent and received, was amazing
I had a Casio Cassiopeia, psion series 5, HP jornada 680, Sony clie(the folding one with a keyboard and camera), some weird sharp Linux, and a 2nd gen vaio p. Thanks for the walk down memory lane
I remember drooling over the Palm Pilots, Nokia Communicators and Sony Mavicas in the backs of PC magazines! Sadly they were never in my budget. Now I'm still amazed that the smart phone in my pocket beats them all! 😊
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.
05:56 Sorry Nathan, I lost it here 😂😂
Absolutely great video, as usual! Visit sydney and hope to say hi to you someday haha
DUDE WHAT?!?!?! I had a Palm III as a young teen. Its what brought me into the pc-side of the electronics world! I wish I still had it now that I'm older and know how it actually works.
I had a few of these back in the day - a Psion Siena (the fancy 1mb model!), a Casio Pocket Viewer and later a HP Pocket PC. All got a good deal of use - I even (improbably) wrote a uni essay on the Siena while travelling on a train. The HP was tricked out w/ WIFI & Bluetooth and when compared to the phone I had at the time (Ericsson T20s) was a technological marvel. Sadly the first two were lost when my car was broken into and the HP became obsolete as phone tech caught up and overtook it. Given a chance, I'd replace the Siena as with full-rose coloured specs on, it was truly amazing.
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)
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...
This brings back some memories. I had a Palm Zire 31 back in the days. Paired with a Bluetooth gps puck and a copy of Tom Tom I crossed all around the Netherlands with my wife and kids. I later switched to an HTC Artemis with Tom Tom . It ran windows ce. That was the last of my PDA and my first so to say Smartphone experience.
7:19 *Cool shout-out* 😂
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.!!!
11:49 I had the Tungsten E2. I used it for listening to MP3s and MIDIs. Was also capable of emulating NES and Gameboy games at full speed. Of course, the bottom controls were not good for platformers. but you could get away with playing RPG and puzzle games. I believe if you encoded them right, you could also play video files. It was also a decent sketchpad. It was originally for my mom's work, but she didn't have time to figure out how to use it so it ended up in my hands.
Lovely video I loved these as well. The Nokia n93 was a really cool phone it was flip but screen rotated and because like a mini computer running simbion S60 platform it was really cool had WiFi and Carl Zeiss lens with optical zoom.
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.
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.
As a kid, I wanted an HP 660 LX Palmtop sooo bad. Eventually, I was able to get a Palm IIIxe and I loved that thing. I used it through college.
Very nice video!
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
I used an eMate in primary school. I loved using it, as did the rest of my class. I think we had… half a dozen of them for a field trip I think? :)