The Lost AgendA

These days I use my Sony Ericsson P900 for note-taking. But this "PC Plus" column from 1993 reminds me that I once had a much faster and better way of taking electronic notes. The MicroWriter AgendA was about the size of your hand, with a small mono LCD screen and fingerpads that you pressed as chords to create the different letters of the alphabet (the Wikipedia entry "Chorded Keyboard" explains this).

I see I've been rather kind to the Apple Newton here. The truth is its so-called "character recognition" was not just "less than plausible" -- it was pure bloody infuriation on a stick. The Psion Series 3a, on the other hand, worked out rather better than I hint at here. I did learn more or less to touch type on it. A firm resting surface was essential, yes, but you also needed a wad of Blutak, otherwise you'd end up chasing the the Series 3a around the desk.

But the AgendA really was King. On one occasion I even used it to write my column while walking down the Strip to a press conference, where I transferred it to a colleague's portable computer so he could relay it back to the UK office. Come to think of it, this might even be that column...

[Future 20: The PDA][PCP][1 Dec 93][chb]

Comdex Fall is an exciting place to be, but it isn't the place to see the future. Well, not if you want to live to tell the tale. What goes into the booths at the Las Vegas Exhibition Center and at the Hilton, the Sands and at Bally's Casino Resort are all the things you knew were going to happen anyway, at least if you're a regular reader of PC Plus. The fact that PowerPC was the hottest news at Comdex, or that Bill Gates publicly unveiled Chicago, came as no surprise to any of you out there.

What goes on *behind* the booths is another matter. The manufacturers have tiny back rooms concealed behind their show stages, or will send a long black limo to cruise you off to a distant hotel suite, or will corner you at one of the many midnight chilli fests around some moon-reflecting swimming pool. That's where the veil is lifted on tomorrow's secrets. Unfortunately they *are* secret, and before you see any of it or discuss it with them they make you put your autograph on a “Non-Disclosure Agreement”, and you sign away any right to pass the news on to your readers. They're also not necessarily very interesting secrets -- things like a new SCSI adaptor, same as last year's but smaller and a bit faster.

A bit pointless, really. Well, I thought so, and this year mostly stayed out of the secret circle. But when you pass up the chance to hunt for news that dare not speak its name, the sheer incongruous vastness of Comdex out front is enough to confuse the poor old journalistic brain. If you're going to come back from Las Vegas with more than just an extra suitcase of brochures, you need some kind of a theme to hold it all together.

I stumbled across my theme on the Sunday before the show started. I'd collected my heavy as a brick Program and Exhibits Guide from the registration tent, and was headed back on foot towards the teeming lobby of my hotel to check, without much hope, whether they'd managed to find my registration. You can see the huge terra cotta tristar of the Treasure Island from the Exhibition Center, but in trying to make a bee-line for it I became entangled in maze of brick walls. Negotiating the last of these tumbled me down into the street right at the feet of a passing Englishman, who turned out to be an old acquaintence of mine, David Viewing, MD of Ranger Computers. Years ago David started Husky, a company that in the early ‘80's arguably was first on the scene with a portable small and rugged enough to qualify as what we now call a Personal Digital Assistant.

Over non-stop cups of coffee at a nearby “7 & Eleven” David and I fell to arguing about paradigm shifts and The Big Picture. He managed to convince me that the one issue worth watching out for was the evolution of the PDA. “It's not a matter of getting the underlying technology right -- that's more or less in place. It's how you do the interface. Whoever gets that interface right will open the door to the next era of computing.” The catch is that nobody will know they've got it right until a couple of million people get a chance to try it. A chicken and egg situation, fraught with probable failure, but somewhere in Comdex, if you knew where to look, there may be a product that embodies the essentials and opens the door to the new way of thinking we'll need.

Well, I have a problem with this, as regular readers of this column will know. I found the PDA of tomorrow back in 1989 -- the MicroWriter AgendA. It has a tiny, 20 character by 4 line mono screen, and for input uses a set of seven keys on which you play “chords” to create all the letters of the alphabet. It fits in my inside jacket pocket, and I carry it with me everywhere as my diary, phone book, and notebook. The chordal keyboard is a lot less weird than it sounds, it really does only take half an hour to learn, and it's the only machine I know of that you can write with one handed while walking round an exhibition. The catch is, the public has tried it and rejected it. Last year the company that designed it went out of business.

With the Viewing Plan in mind I set about scouring Comdex for the next face of computing. I came up with three candidates: The Apple Newton, the new Psion Series 3a, and the IBM/SouthWest Bell Simon. Two of these have made it back to my office for extended experimentation. The Simon, alas, is a US only product.

You know the Newton already, of course -- a manageably small pen computer with a convincing battery life. You probably know the Psion Series 3 too. The new 3a widens the screen without changing the neat shirt-pocket size, adds a “Digital Audio System” with the rather limited ability to record a sound or two, and now very usefully includes a spreadsheet in its built-in suite of Windows-like multitasking software. That's two very different paradigms: the pen and paper notebook, or the scaled down typewriter. Neither quite does the job for me. The Newton seems to have a less than plausible handwriting recognition interface. The tiny keyboard of the Psion Series 3a is a faster way of getting data in, but is too small to touch type, and really needs to be set up on a desk.

The Simon comes at this from a completely different angle. Its paradigm is the portable telephone, but where you would expect to find the buttons the designers have put an LCD touch sensitive screen. The screen lets the machine double as a telephone and a PDA, with the advantage of giving you a built-in wireless data connection along the lines of the Cognito Messager was talked about in this column a couple of months ago.

So that's three new volume products to watch. None of them really does the job the way you know you need it done: the big question is whether they will deliver enough in the way of customer satisfaction to get used and stay in business until the technology catches up. Two years ago at Comdex the new pen computers were out in force, and you might have predicted then that by the end of 1993 visitors to the exhibition would be routinely using the things to take notes as they move from stand to stand. But no, among the 170,000 visitors this year the only high tech mobile note taking you were likely to see was me and my faithful AgendA.