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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

That was awesome. I'm still not sure what part of it was satire and what part was a real countermovement, but the hipster PDA made me read up on nice pens and paper. For a while I had an old-school Filofax. I even made my own template for calendar pages, and had a little foldable public transport map in the back. Every now and then I try to get back to a paper organizer, but things like online calendar sync are too comfortable.

Also, remember that this was before smartphones, social media and the attention stealing craze. I can imagine nowadays there would be a lot of people wanting to try out something low tech like that.

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> Also, remember that this was before smartphones, social media and the attention stealing craze.

No, smartphone already existed at that point, they just were not from Apple or with Android. More popular at that time were PDA and electronic organizers, from Psion, Treo, Blackberry, with Windows Mobile... Small optimized Offline-devices with sometimes optional network-access. Even the attention-sinks already were a thing at that point, but came in form of sms, e-mail, WAP-services.

But, not for the general population. Those things were expensive, and had limited benefit. So this Hipster PDA was the discount-version of those expensive Toys I mean it's even directly in the name...

Not satire at all actually, and to be a counter movement would suggest that there was more movement behind PDAs than there actually was. The name maybe a little bit of a joke, but this was a legitimate system that Merlin Mann came up with and used in his job at the time that served functionally the same role as a PDA at a fraction of the cost. About the only things it wouldn’t do is synchronize with your computer or tell you the time; but it also didn’t run on batteries or depend on an idiosyncratic pen input method or tiny keyboard.

> remember that this was before smartphones

This was pre-phone, but solidly in the Blackberry era of smartphones

Merlin himself actually used the system, so, at least he bought into his own hype.

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