I try not to think too much about how much tech I’ve bought and discarded over the years. I try to think even less about the fact that a very decent proportion of that tech is sitting in a landfill somewhere. And, I try very hard not to think about how much I could sell some of that tech for, if I still had it today in pristine condition.
The personal digital assistant
I was obsessed for roughly 20 years with the idea of a personal digital assistant. I wasn’t the only one. Sometime in 1989, I saw someone much wealthier than I using one of the first Sharp Wizard devices. It looked something like this:
It’s difficult to explain precisely why, but I thought this was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. It was about the size of a checkbook or large wallet and you could keep all your appointments, take notes, and even do some BASIC programming if you had the right setup. It was far too expensive for me at the time, but I wanted one. Oh yes, I wanted one.
About four years later, I scored a used one of these, which I thought was even better, owing to its QWERTY keyboard. I even had an expansion card that did basic translation into and out of Spanish.
This device served me for years. It lasted forever on its meager batteries and honestly it kept me organized. There was a way, I think, to hook it to a PC so that you could back up contacts, but I didn’t use it.
A detour into portable computing
I kept that Sharp Wizard busy for most of the 1990s. It had been a fairly big investment at the time. I was distracted, though, by HP’s line of extremely small computers. These were actual PCs that were small enough to fit in your hands. When I could finally afford one, I picked up one of these HP300LX devices. It ran a stripped-down version of Windows, synced easily with a computer using a cable, and could even print if you had the right printer (I didn’t.)
I did a lot of real actual word processing and spreadsheet work on this thing. It used AA batteries and I only changed them about every six months. The only downside was its lack of a backlight. The photo above really does show roughly how dim the display was.
The only thing was, it really wasn’t small enough to carry around. You couldn’t fit it in your pocket and it was surprisingly heavy. It lasted about three years before I realized that I needed something I could put in a blazer pocket.
The Jornada journey
Here’s where the story gets sad. Inspired by a friend at the time, I bought one of these HP Jornada 540 units. It was less expensive than the competing Compaq iPaq that people loved back at the turn of the century and it had this cool flip open hood.
This was, without a doubt, my favorite piece of handheld tech until I got a smartphone. I had a GPS adapter for it, additional memory, and I even put a few music and video files on it. Like the HP 300LX, it synched with my PC and so I got all my contacts and calendar items into it quickly. I really thought I looked like a boss using it.
Sometime around 2002, I was carrying a bunch of stuff into the office and it fell out of my pocket. The device seemed unhurt at first, but I realized within a few hours that the charging port had broken. In short, it worked, but it couldn’t be charged or powered. For the next few days I held a bit of a vigil for it until it finally turned off for the last time. I can still remember it sitting on an end table in my living room breathing its last.
From that point on…
I went on to have a variety of smart devices. Despite a quick detour into the world of Palm OS that I still regret, I was infatuated with the Windows Mobile OS for most of the 2000s because you could sync it to Outlook on your PC using a cable.) I had several more devices that used it, including some phones that were just a tiny bit removed from being true smart devices as we know them today. The excitement for personal digital assistants had dimmed for me, though, at the exact moment that the Jornada’s screen went dark.
Today of course, our phones do everything that a device like this can do and more. They are so much more powerful and capable, with everything you need built in. It doesn’t stop me from getting nostalgic now and again.
I’m not the only one, I supposed. I was inspired to write this article by this video:
This YouTuber’s journey was a little different from mine, but the feeling seems like it was about the same.
Do you miss your old tech sometimes? It doesn’t make a lot of sense since today’s tech is so much better, but that’s the funny thing about the past. We don’t remember what it was, we remember how it made us feel.
