Welcome back to part 6 of my fifth SepTandy Spectacular. In the last post we took a look the Tandy 1400LT, Tandy's first successful IBM Compatible Laptop and most successful Laptop since the 100. In this post we move from laptops to PDA's, by having a look at Tandy's ZPDA.
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Released in 1993, the Tandy ZPDA was one of the earliest examples of a personal digital assistant (Or PDA). While PDA's became especially popular in the 90's and 2000's, it took a while for them to catch on with the ZPDA being a flop.
The earliest example of a PDA was the Psion Orginizer, released in in the UK by Psion in 1984. The Orginizer looked very different from later PDA's. It looked more like a Calculator and was designed to store data on Special EPROM's based cartridges called Datapaks.
The Orginizer proved to be a sales hit, With Psion following it up with the Orginizer II in 1986, featuring a better keyboard, a 2 line display, a much larger ROM, 8K (With the original CM Model), 16 or 32K (With the XP Model), 32 or 64K (With the later LZ Model) of battery-backed RAM, and featured a capable newly designed single-tasking operating system.
So how did PDA's go from calculator like to being touchscreen driven? Well the answer to that starts at Apple Computer a year later in 1987. Designer Steve Sakoman was working on a a tablet computer priced about the same as a desktop computer the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper and would have cursive handwriting recognition and a special user interface.
Sakoman previoulsy worked for HP as a manufacturing engineer and project manager, where he designed the HP 110, the worlds first battery-powered portable MS-DOS PC released in 1984.
Steve Jobs hired Sakoman to help work on a laptop version of the Macintosh after the successful release of the HP Portable, But after Jobs left Apple, the laptop plans were scrapped, and Sakoman helped lead the teams creating the Mac Plus, Mac SE, and Mac II.
By then, he wanted to leave the company to work on handheld computers, and he recruited Jean Louis Gassée to lead a brand new company that would be bankrolled by Lotus founder, Mitch Kapor. The plan fell through, since it appeared that Apple would probably sue the nascent company. Instead, Gassée proposed creating an Apple handheld computer as a skunk works project. Gassée got permission to start the project from Sculley (without telling him what was being researched), and Sakoman set to work naming the project Newton.
Developement cost and changing management delayed the project for a number of years. But by 1990, Apple CEO John Sculley officially gave the project the green light and gave the team the goal to produce a Newton handheld that cost less than $1,500 would have to be ready by April 2, 1992. The original "Figaro" Prototype with 3 AT&T Hobbit CPUs, a hard drive, an active matrix LCD, and infrared for high speed, long distance networking was suplanted with the much smaller 4.5″ x 7 inch "Junior" which used the newer ARM CPU, and could retail at $500 dollars.
The device was eventually named the Apple Newton MessagePad 100, and it made its debut on August 2, 1993 at a retail price of $699 dollars.
The MessagePad 100, proved to be a market failure, due to its high price and flawed handwriting. Still The concepts of the device were inspiring similar devices like the Amstrad PenPad PDA 600 and the AT&T EO.
The Tandy ZPDA was released in 1993 at a retail price of $699 dollars.
SImilar to other Tandy portable computers, the ZPDA was actually an OEMed device from Casio, who sold their version as the Zoomer Z-7000. It was also sold by AST as the Gridpad 2390
On the front of the machine, lies capacitive touchscreen display, a hardwired panel for the built in applications, a Dpad, A and B buttons, a button to release the flip out cover, and a speaker grill.
Bellow that you have a headphone jack and the slot for the stylus pen.
On the right side, is the contrast adjustment wheel, the power switch, and the volume wheel.
On the left side, there is a PCMCIA card slot, an AC adapter, and an RS232 serial port for connecting to a PC.
On the Top there is the aforementioned protective cover to keep the screen clean and damage free when not in use, as well as the release button and speaker.
And finally on the bottom, You the expected model information markings and the battery compartment.
Powering on the ZPDA, your greeted by a very farmilliar OS for those farmilliar with vintage PC's. The ZPDA runs a version of none other than GEOS from Berkley Softworks (Or GeoWorks Corporation as they were called by that point). With this version including varrious programs like a notepad, a date book, a to-do list, an address book, a calculator, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a spell checker, A version of Quicken, some built in games, and even a 26 language translator.
GEOS itself shares an interesting origin story. Berkeley Softworks, Inc., was founded in 1983 by Brian Dougherty, The Co Founder of Imagic. Dougherty founded the company after Imagic collapsed in the wake of the video game market crash of 1983.
Berkeley Softworks intally published games for home computers like as the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the IBM PC. But by 1985, Dougherty was assembling a team to design a GUI based OS for the C64.
They called the OS GEOS (Or Graphic Environment Operating System), and it made its debut in 1986 for the C64 and C128.
GEOS was an imeddiate success, reciving glowing reviews at the 1986 CES Show and sold in great numbers, reciving ports to the Apple II and a completed but unreleased version for the Commodore Plus/4.
For storage, you have the previously mentioned PCMCIA Card Slot, giving you access to either a 256K battery backed SRAM expansion, of 20MB Flash Memory for storage. Of course you can also use the Serial port to connect to a PC and transfer data to your desktop. You could also use it to connect to a printer to directly print your notes to paper.
For hardware, the ZPDA uses an NEC V20 based CPU clocked at 7.16 MHz, 1MB of RAM, and 4MB of ROM.
The screen is a 3.5 by 4 inch capacitive touch screen with a .3mm dot pitch and displays graphics at a resolution of 320x56.
It also has a small Speaker for sound effects, and runs on rechargable 3 AA Batteries (With an Approximate 100 hour battery life) or the previously mentioned AC adapter.
Softwarewise, There weren't really any stand alone applications for it known to exist. Despite GEOS being an open OS and GeoWorks being known for providing everyting for developers, no software was every really developed for it However, there were some PC programs that could link to the ZPDA dirrectly like Act, Lotus Orginizer, and Quicken. It also had a version of AOL built in, so it was possible to download software from the internet.
So how did the ZPDA sell? Not very well! like many early PDA's, the ZPDA was Big, Bulky, ridiculosly expensive, and not much more convinent than the paper notepads they were designed to replace. While the ZPDA was certainly better than its Competitors in terms of its OS and not relying so heavly on handwritting recognition, it still wasn't enough to convice peopple to buy it.
But the company that cracked the PDA design code was the very company that helped Casio and Tandy develop the software for the ZPDA: Palm Computing, Inc.
Palm Computing, Inc., was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins, specifically to write software for the ZPDA, with Palm provided the PIM software.
While the ZPDA failed commercially, Palm continued generating revenue by selling software to other companies such as synchronization software for HP devices, and a new handwriting recognition software for the Apple Newton MessagePad called Grafiti.
The company was acquired by USRobotics in 1995 and soon began developing a PDA of their own. Unlike previous devices, this PDA was smaller, simplier and cheaper. The result was the Pilot 1000, released in March 1996 at a retail price of $299 dollars.
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The device was a sales hit, and was so succsesful that by the end of the 1996 Christmas season, the Pilot 1000 and its 512K RAM counterpart Pilot 5000 held over 70% of the US handheld computer market, with the HP LX series coming in at a distant second. Software developers had taken an interest as well, with hundreds of compatible applications available for the Pilot 1000. Palm soon followed it with impoved successors like the PalmPilot Personal, the PalmPilot Professional, and the Palm III. They also began merging PDA features into moble phones in the form of the Trio 600, making it one of the earliest examples of a modern smartphone.
Palm would continue to manufacture PDA's until 2008, when they shifted focus toward smartphones. In 2010 they were purchased by HP who continued the palm brand for another year before discontinuing development and support of all Palm devices in 2011. So while the ZPDA was a failure, it's legacy ended up living on.
And that concudes my look at the Tandy ZPDA, an early PDA flop that turned into a software companies big break for cracking the PDA market, kicking off a wireless personal communication revolution. This concludes part 6 of my fifth SepTandy Spectacular, tune in next time as we go bigger again to have a look at the Tandy WP-2
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