I thought I could hear the voice of the man who worked on the PDA600 coming through . Hope I have the right person or I now look [very] silly .
Nope, I am the PDA600 man. It still remains one of the most interesting projects I ever project managed. It also shows how things have moved on since the early 90's - these days you can get a touch screen operated organiser for about £50 upwards, back then we had no option but to charge £300 which is why it wasn't very successful. It's a shame because if we'd persevered we might be up there with all the other major league PDA manufacturers these days but it's nice to know that we were the very first ever hand writing recognition PDA - even 6 months in advance of the Apple Newton.
(sorry for OT post - nostalgia got the better of me!)
Yup GEM was (at that time) far superior to Windows 2.0 - it was far more like the Mac interface but that was it's downfall. When Microsoft finally caught up and brough out Windows 3.0 we then switched because by then everyone wanted "Windows" (even though it truly dire on an 8086, awful on a 286 and only just acceptable on a 386 - ah, the joys of bloatware - nice to see Vista keeping up that maxim 16 years later!)
Yeah, although, to be fair, GEM didn't even try multitasking. Each application replaced the previous, until you exited. Windows at least made the first steps with non-preemptive multitasking... god help you when an application crashed though!!
Comments
(sorry for OT post - nostalgia got the better of me!)
Cliff
Cliff