Have found a few more website bugs that need to be swatted. Mostly pages where I've got too many thumbnails in tables pushing the page width too far for mobile devices. Easily sorted, and I think all the local ones now have been done. Going to do a bit more testing tomorrow to see if I find anything else before updating the live version. Actually pretty pleased with how little I've found today.
Also had a parcel arrive which contained the next entry for the vintage technology page...
The early 80s were a truly fascinating period from the perspective of microelectronics. Companies the world over suddenly found they had microprocessors which were affordable enough and had low enough power draw that they could stuff them into consumer products...even though they didn't actually know quite what to actually *do* with them.
Which is how we ended up with little gems like this one from Casio, circa 1983.
I have always generally thought of personal organizers as a strictly 90s thing...never really being particularly useful in any way that a traditional Filofax and a watch couldn't already manage. There were zillions of the things made during the 90s, the vast majority of which most likely got used for a week then forgotten about.
I did use the one I got in about 98 mainly as a task list right through until I got my first Palm (a fifth hand extremely tatty Palm Tungsten E in about 2005 - which was one of the first bits of technology I truly found myself integrating into pretty much every aspect of day to day life) which is of course what the personal organizers were trying to be - it just took until the turn of the 21st century for mass market tech to really catch up to make them really useful.
When my Palm Tungsten died it was the first time I'd had a device fail where I really felt it left a noticeable void. It had my diary in (and synced with Groupwise at work so I had it all in one place), had my reading material for the train to and from work, had most of the reference manuals I used regularly in PDF form on, was an always present notepad (with handwriting recognition that didn't suck!), dictaphone, and even allowed me to - admittedly very slowly - send email when on the go when hooked up to my phone.
Then there's things like the Psion Series 5, which I also put a good number of hours on a well used one back in the day. It won out over the Palm in quite a few regards, battery life and having a proper keyboard being two main ones. Plus it virtually invited you to write your own software.
The idea of an electronic data bank though went back a lot further...This was Casio's first shot at what we'd later come to call a PDA. It made sense for them to have a shot at the market...they already had a respected name in the field of portable electronics, especially calculators. I can also see the sense in what they did, essentially expanding a calculator to include the databank capabilities rather than splitting it off as a totally separate (expensive!) device.
The resulting device has a very similar form factor to the fx-451M scientific calculator which was launched a couple of years later in 1985. This used the same sort of membrane keypad on the folding cover to allow a (very well featured) scientific calculator to fit in to the same package as a basic four function pocket calculator. It's still one of my favourite bits of design, and one I use regularly.
The family resemblance isn't hard to see is it?
With the PF-3000 however there are a few...well...issues. Largely stemming from the fact that it was 1983 and this was largely uncharted territory. First off...it has 2.9K of memory. 0.9K internally and with an additional 2K memory module slotted in the back. Yes, I did type that correctly, a 2*kilo*byte expansion module.
The longest string of data it will let you input is 50 characters. If you used the full length, sixty memos will fill the memory! The phone directory is an even bigger memory hog as there are two lines of each entry, one for the name and one for the number. I did a bit of quick math based on the average length of ten random names from the middle of my contacts, and came up with an average name length of 12 characters per name (including spaces) and of course 11 digits for a normal UK phone number (even though that would have been shorter back then). So you'd fill the memory with 130 phone numbers. It's fine for noting some down while you're away on a business trip, but it's not going to take over from your desktop phone book.
Then there's the UI. Casio are actually pretty good at making these types of membrane keypads not painfully awful, especially for their intended use case. However the ABC keyboard layout is an abomination. They would have been far better flipping it through 90 degrees and going for a Qwerty layout...oh...but then the display would be the wrong way around...yeah, you can see how it was a necessary evil to keep with the "normal calculator" form factor.
There's also something blindingly obvious missing from the keyboard...an enter key. It took me far longer to figure out that to save a record to memory you need to select the relevant mode, press the data button to light a *tiny* indicator on the display to show you're in data input mode, type whatever in, then to store it you have to press the mode button for phone or memo again. Deleting data involves you finding the record, setting data mode to input, clearing the display and then saving it. It's just clunky. Especially is there is a mix of numbers and letters to enter as numbers have to be input through the calculator keypad. Awkward and clunky.
As is reading anything. You have a single line, ten character display to work with.
By the time you've fumbled your way to whatever you're looking for by the tiny arrow keys (there's no search function to jump to a selected letter or anything), even the briefest of memos is going to involve scrolling, on a screen which isn't exactly the quickest thing to update in the world.
They get ten out of ten for effort...but it's just not very useful. The lack of any form of clock whatsoever loses it points from the PDA usefulness side of things too.
It's a somewhat fascinating little technological time capsule, and feels like they really were trying to push the limits of what they could do...just before the technology was really there. It feels like there isn't any real wasted volume in this thing... it's basically just a solid slab it feels like (must be nearly double the weight of the fx-451M), so they really had to work hard to fit everything into the case. Just made a few too many compromises. Even the calculator keypad has zero travel keys to shave an extra 0.5mm or so off the 10mm thickness of the device (it is literally twice as thick as the LC-826/8 pocket calculator from 1980/1). The footprint isn't huge though. Fx-451M is on the left.
Useful? Not so much. Deserving of mention for effort, definitely. Exactly the sort of oddball technological ugly duckling my website was made to showcase.
It was in production for less than a year...suggests most prospective buyers thought the same! That you were essentially paying a small fortune for a very bulky, very heavy 10-digit pocket calculator with a pretty poor keypad that ate CR2032 batteries at quite an alarming rate. The whole idea of trying to cram a PDA into a calculator form factor was always going to be a huge gamble...and it was one that turned out to be a dead end eventually. Hence after s few years devices trying to fill these roles had mostly adopted something more akin to what you'd recognise in terms of form factor.
This one while rebadged by Tandy was actually made by Casio. This dates from 1990.
Very clunky compared to later offerings from the middle of the decade (and featuring some fantastically obtuse UI design), but it looks like a personal organizer rather than a prop from a cheap 80s sci-fi show.
That was meant to be a five minute post with one photo. Oops.
Was that with Cityfibre/Vodafone FTTP or another provider? I ask as my change from Plusnet ADSL to Vodafone FTTP went as smooth as silk... They turned up at the time they promised and was online with them in less then an hour after their arrival...