Personal Digital Assistants

The personal digital assistant (PDA) is what Apple (the computer company) thinks we have all been waiting for. They coined the term a couple of years ago to refer to a small, hand‐held electronic device which would allow common clerical tasks such as note‐taking, maintaining a contact list keeping a diary and so on. A true PDA did not at the time exist, although companies such as Casio and Sharp had moved up from plain calculators to provide machines that could maintain addresses and telephone numbers and a simple diary. These were designed to replace the personal organizer rather than the computer and were limited in a number of respects. They did work, although most of the people I know who had tried them, soon reverted to old‐fashioned pen and paper. It was generally too time‐consuming to work your way through to the data that you wanted to access or to input new data on the very tiny keyboards.