Rex: The World's Smallest PDA [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
'so it's a phone?'
'no because it isn't. Also because it does not have internet connectivity'
'so it's basically a brick? A smart brick?'
He said something like: "Back when there were no computers [...]."
A student raised his hand, and asked:
"But if there were no computers... How did people access the internet?"
https://www.gravediggerslocal.com/2008/10/the-little-monster...
AFAIK there even were late models which could make calls and browse the web.
Smartphones were called "communicators", modem-less models (like what today iPod is to iPhone) were called PDAs.
They didn't trademark the term, so once the iPhone and Androids came out it was applied to them as well.
There are quite a few industry terms like this. "PDA" was coined by Apple to describe the Newton in generic terms. The term "game console" was promoted by Nintendo in the early 90s to prevent clueless parents from calling rival systems "Nintendos"; before that we called them systems or just referred to them by brand name.
Too bad that didn't quite work.
(the SIM card part would be because it is something the students could do with their own phones -and some might have done at some point- so they'd have first hand experience)
I'd like a business-card sized display that could show simple things like my calendar and contacts while being as thin as possible - a small BTLE and WiFi board attached to a .4 mm LiPo battery and an touch e-ink display on top of the whole thing would probably work.
That's presumably where the USB-C and/or Bluetooth would come in. Nowadays it wouldn't be all that infeasible to have a flip-out USB-C plug.
Or hell, have the backside be a solar panel, and make the device entirely wireless.
What's really fun is you can still buy them brand new for not much money.
https://www.casio.com/us/watches/casio/databank/
I still think that Rex is neat for the time. Would have made an interesting ebook for Project Gutenberg back in the day. Lots of scrolling but you'd always have it with you if you got bored.
https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/history-of-casio-dbc-dbx-... gives a nice overview of many of the models and their features.
If the ones for sale now were as good as they were in the past or better I would probably get one, mainly for nostalgia.
That thing ran a full-fledged version of PalmOS. Way, way ahead of its time. (No pun intended. :P)
If you haven’t seen this little wonder - check it out here:
Obviously the use is now trumped by an always connected phone but i'm thinking of uses where the internet isn't always available. Something like this could come in handy if you kept it in your glove box in your car and it was good at keeping a charge for lengthy periods of time.
According to the video the batteries lasted for months - perfect for this "backup device" use case.
There are also credit-card sized smart phones like the Palm (they are thicker than credit cards).
Firstly, without a standard, your just engineering your own solutions and no one else can serendipitously solve your problems for you in the form of a product you can just buy, like the one in the posted article.
Secondly, USB is a much more complicated protocol than the PCI and ISA of days past. Not only that, but the standards are a patchwork of publicly available parts of an otherwise unavailable proprietary whole that the USB standards organisation gatekeeps access too. Yes enough of it is public you can make your own things, but no it’s not the same as things like the ISA bus which is completely documented. You can’t just whip up a cool gadget with logic and some memory then expose it to a computer and then the computer reads it… now you have a bunch of embedded device work to do so your gadget can initialise its side of the communication protocol and respond to whatever software you write sending it interrogation messages over whatever protocol you end up using. So much more complex.
I did a bunch of research recently on computer interface busses while looking for a “slot bus” to build something out of embedded hardware modules that were individually responsible for their on-board logic but needed a common backplane for power and inter module communication… seems simple right, well no… it turns out the last fully open well documented “passive backplane” bus was ISA bus. So I’ve had to begin pondering how to build my own solution, which will probably just be some kind of SPI which leads me to my current lament of standards other than USB, when everything is a USB device, if your use case is for something other than USB then your just out of luck.
USB 2.0 and 1.1 are trivial solved problems in practice. They're built into so many chips now, and it's far easier to work with in terms of PCB design. Stuff like the ESP32-S2 or even the soft implementations in 8 bit micros are really good and just work, plus you have the possibility of fully driverless stuff pretending to be storage, keyboards, midi, ethernet, etc, and it's all just as easy as any other Arduino lib, no protocol understanding needed.
It's true that you can't do dumb passive stuff with it(Although if you really wanted to you could use a dedicated USB to SPI/I2C/GPIO whatever chip and have the PC emulate whatever you want), but that doesn't really hold back products, things are just done differently.
It sucks for anyone trying to make gadgets that aren't just a microcontroller plus code, but there's so many possibilities with the new style that it's worth learning.
For hobby tinkering type stuff and exploring stuff outside "A PC that talks to a MCU", yeah, it's not really a supported use case.