Handheld computers

The origins of handheld computers go back to the 1960s, when Alan Kay, a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, promoted the vision of a small, powerful notebook-style computer that he called the Dynabook. Kay never actually built a Dynabook (the technology had yet to be invented), but his vision helped to catalyze the research that would eventually make his dream feasible.

It happened by small steps. The popularity of the personal computer and the ongoing miniaturization of the semiconductor circuitry and other devices first led to the development of somewhat smaller, portable—or, as they were sometimes called, luggable—computer systems. The first of these, the Osborne 1, designed by Lee Felsenstein, an electronics engineer active in the Homebrew Computer Club in San Francisco, was sold in 1981. Soon, most PC manufacturers had portable models. At first these “portables” looked like sewing machines and weighed in excess of 20 pounds (9 kg). Gradually they became smaller laptop-, notebook-, and then sub-notebook-sized and came with more powerful processors. These devices allowed people to use computers not only in the office or at home but while they were traveling—on airplanes, in waiting rooms, or even at the beach.

As the size of computers continued to shrink and microprocessors became more and more powerful, researchers and entrepreneurs explored new possibilities in mobile computing. In the late 1980s and early '90s, several companies came out with handheld computers, called personal digital assistants. PDAs typically replaced the cathode-ray tube screen with a more compact liquid-crystal display, and they either had a miniature keyboard or replaced the keyboard with a stylus and handwriting-recognition software that allowed the user to write directly on the screen. Like the first personal computers, PDAs were built without a clear idea of what people would do with them. In fact, people did not do much at all with the early models. To some extent, the early PDAs, made by Go Corporation and Apple Computer, Inc., were technologically premature; with their unreliable handwriting recognition, they offered little advantage over paper-and-pencil planning books.

The potential of this new kind of device was finally realized with the release in March 1997 of Palm Computing, Inc.'s Palm Pilot, which was about the size of a deck of playing cards and sold for around $400—approximately the same price as the MITS Altair, the first personal computer sold as a kit in 1974. The Pilot did not try to replace the computer but made it possible to organize and carry information with an electronic calendar, telephone number and address list, memo pad, and expense-tracking software and to synchronize that data with a PC. The device included an electronic cradle to connect to a PC and pass information back and forth. It also featured a data-entry system, called “graffiti,” which involved writing with a stylus using a slightly altered alphabet that the device recognized. Its success encouraged numerous software companies to develop applications for it. In 1998 this market heated up further with the entry of several established consumer electronics firms using Microsoft's Windows CE operating system (a stripped-down version of the Windows system) to sell handheld computer devices and wireless telephones that could connect to PCs.

These small devices also often possessed a communications component and benefited from the sudden popularization of the Internet and the World Wide Web (discussed in the next section, The Internet).