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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

As a kid, this phone was like my dream gadget, I still remember really wanting one and staring at it at the store.

To be honest, I don't know what I wouldv'e done with it, being 12 years old.

Anybody remember those "organizer" gadgets, with a screen and a calander and notes, but not a phone? I got one of those and didn't really use it for anything useful.

I did now just order de Fold 3. Comparable.

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I have Dyslexia, which in me mostly surfaces as confusion of the various theirs, and a writing speed which would result in me never completing any class work. I dealt with that by learning to type, after which all my work was done on organiser type devices, first an Amstrad NC100, and then later on a Psion Series 5mx.

The Psion was such a lovely device, it would fit in a large pocket, but had a proper keyboard that you could comfortably type at a decent speed on. It was also my introduction to programming, and so probably indirectly responsible for me coming out of school with reasonable grades (having been able to actually finish work), and a career I'm still in twenty years later.

yes!! big time Casio Business Navigator BN-40A fan when I was 12 years old. had it for like 2 weeks before selling it to my best friend because my excitement had dropped off. But so cool to have something that looked like a super small laptop and such a wide screen.

> Anybody remember those "organizer" gadgets, with a screen and a calander and notes, but not a phone? I got one of those and didn't really use it for anything useful.

Older, I guess, but I still have an Atari Portfolio from 1989 or so. It still works but I don't use it anymore ; )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio

Yeah, me and a friend of mine got one from a shop, I think they were like €15 or €25,- at the time - pretty steep for pocket money, but not impossible. I mean we didn't actually use it much and since it only had a two line LCD screen, entering e.g. school schedules and contact information into it was a bit painful, but it was a neat gadget to have.

I have it in the drawer near my PC at the moment, I think I put in a battery the other day, still works.

Later on I bought a secondhand Palm V from the internet, I think it was €25,- that thing was pretty cool and more of the 'smartphone' functionality than the organizer; you could install apps on it and the like, so Sudoku was a favorite.

When I was 12 I remember really wanting my dev environment (turbo/free pascal) on a PDA but not being able to find one with good support. Eventually I got a Zarus but I wasn't good enough with Linux to get Free Pascal working on it.

Exactly my experience! I had a Casio SF-R20 when I was around 13 years old, and it was a my first introduction to spreadsheets (IIRC the spreadsheet app was called Lucid 3-D).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_organizer#/media/Fi...

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