The history of the personal digital assistant

Although the palmtop computer, also known as the PDA(personal digital assistant) has been with us since the early 80s, it is only in the last few years that they have become a popular mass market product. The reason for this has been the convergence of mobile phone and computer technology, exemplified by products such as the Blackberry and the Nokia N97, which are basically small, internet capable multimedia PCs that can also be used as mobile phones.

The daddy of them all was the Casio PF3000, a digital personal organiser that could do everything your Filofax could do, but without all the tatty bits of paper. Though it might have looked like a glorified pocket calculator, it was really quite powerful for its time and sold well upon its launch in 1983. Other firms, such as Psion and GO, followed suit and by the start of the nineties, the market was awash with digital organisers, signalling the end of the line for the paper based organiser.

The name PDA was coined by Apple to describe their new organiser, the Newton, in 1992, which differed from other organisers in that it did away with the need for a small keypad, using a detachable stylus, handwriting recognition software and a graphical user interface instead.

It was not, however, a genuinely useful item in itself, as the handwriting recognition software didn't quite work, and without anything else to input data with, they were consigned to the dustbin of history almost as soon as they were released. There were several other attempts at a stylus-based personal organiser throughout the nineties, but the most successful of these, the Palm Pilot, did away with the pretence of being able to read human handwriting, using a system of strokes to designate different characters that had to be learned by the user.

However, when some bright spark decided to combine a cellphone with a PDA, a monster was born. That monster was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, which came out in 1996 and instantly struck a chord with the occupants of business class on trains and planes, becoming the biggest selling PDA ever made up to that point.

A modern PDA usually features a touch sensitive screen with a detachable stylus or a small QWERTY keyboard for data entry, a memory card slot for data storage, and wireless connectivity via Bluetooth, IrDA and/or WiFi. The inbuilt software usually includes an address book, to do list, diary, notepad, email and a web browser.

An important feature of the modern PDA is the ability to connect it to a computer and share data such as email addresses, documents, and diary entries, at the touch of a button, ensuring that you have at least two copies of this information and that you don't have to enter anything twice.

Modern PDAs can do virtually everything a PC can do, such as run office software, surf the web, play video and audio files and act as satellite navigation systems, and new applications are being developed all the time. Not bad for a technology that is less than thirty years old!

organiser throughout the nineties, but the most successful of these, the Palm Pilot, did away with the pretence of being able to read human handwriting, using a system of strokes to designate different characters that had to be learned by the user.