The Obituary
The pocket electronic organizer was the digital address book that preceded the PDA. From the mid-1980s, Casio, Sharp, and Psion sold credit-card to paperback-sized units with small keyboards and monochrome LCDs that stored contacts, appointments, and memos, often with a calculator and a password lock built in. They replaced the paper Filofax for people who wanted search and never-lost data. The Palm Pilot and other PDAs added touchscreens, syncing, and real software, and then the smartphone folded all of it into the phone, retiring the standalone organizer by the mid-2000s.
Worth remembering
- A tiny QWERTY or alphabetical keyboard let you punch in phone numbers and notes.
- Many doubled as calculators, and some held passwords behind a four-digit lock.
Sources
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.