The Fossil Wrist PDA becomes a tiny Gopher client | Hacker News Reader

The Fossil Wrist PDA becomes a tiny Gopher client

oldvcr.blogspot.com

I got one of these as a gadget-loving teenager and loved the hell out of it. The way the buckle of the wristband hid a tiny stylus was very cool and surprisingly effective. I even had a Game Boy emulator installed and it worked surprisingly well (other than having too few buttons).

I think smartphones and the cloud have diminished the opportunity for us to feel excitement for specialty gadgets like we used to. Folding phones and VR kind of do it for me. I'm curious if any other commenters have products today that still give them the "gadget hype" reminiscent of 2000s tech culture.

Only two "recent" purchases of modern technology gave me "gadget hype": The first was a GPD Pocket -- as it reminded me of old palmtops that I used to have and is still a reasonably powerful computer. The other was the Quest 2 VR headset.

I've instead been collecting vintage and retro portable computers. I have a few Sharp pocket computers that I'm working on interfacing with my desktop. I have a great condition Tandy Model 102. And I have a complete with box HP 660LX coming the mail next week.

It seems like technology is almost too powerful for gadgets to be hype-worthy now. I was hyped for the Pebble Smartwatch but now I have Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 that's way more powerful but doesn't give me gadget hype feelings.

Phone with a thermal imaging a few years back. The Flipper Zero, but I can't justify spending the cash on it. A phone with a 15,000mAh battery more recently. 3d printing in general. Two of these are, as you say, phones.

Me too! Other recent gadgets that have scratched the same itch are the Steam deck and folding phones, though nothing quite captures the feeling of the gadget experimentation going on back then.

The Steam Deck and Framework laptop get me pretty excited!

Love the dedication to the goal.

In 2005 I had a watch computer called the onHand PC. Basically a TI-83 on your wrist. The vendor gave out a C compiler and I wrote a game for it as well as an RSS reader.

Seems pointless now that wifi is so widespread.

(author) Hey, thanks! I like this watch despite its obvious drawbacks, and Fossil did try hard to make it work despite the form factor and the available technology. I vaguely remember the onHand PC. Seems like a similar setup would work for that too ...

I was hoping someone would hack together a Wearos watch to do what the onHand PC was capable of doing but it seems like the interest on a wrist computer has faded

I've tried to get into Gopher and Gemini several times but I just couldn't for the life of me find anything I actually wanted to read.

(This is kind of off topic for the post but) yeah, I do think gopher/gemini suffer in terms of discoverability; perhaps they would benefit from search engines? Or maybe just going old school with web rings and link directories.

I think the problem with Gemini is that it attracts people who want to talk about tech, thus making it just like the rest of the stuff we scroll all day.

The tech is not the main problem with the modern Internet I don't think. Endless scrolling sucks and old forums were amazing, but the bigger problem is we scroll all day, instead of doing stuff worth writing about, so all the content is just a reflection of more stuff on the screen, like a hall of screen mirrors.

Neocities is a much cooler model IMHO for old school web stuff.

Seeing this stirs up PalmOS nostalgia. I have real fond memories of playing SpaceTrader on a backlit Palm V when I was a kid.

Technology is a spiral, not a straight line.

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