In my beginning...

I guess I should explain that I have been a strong protagonist of the mobile lifestyle for nearly 20 years. In 1990 I worked for a company called the Active Book Company in Cambridge UK. They were building one of the first tablet computers which had the form factor of a laptop but had a pen as its primary interface. It one of the first ARM based processors in it and ran the innovative Smalltalk-80 software system making it an exceptionally flexible software platform and very very sloooooowwww. In 1991 Active Book became part of EO. This was AT&T's attempt at a "Personal Communicator" a combination of email, note taker, fax machine and cellphone that you could carry anywhere along with several additional battery packs to make it last more than an hour.

I loved this machine and traveled all over Europe demonstrating it and actually using it as part of my mobile lifestyle. I never could quite understand why ordinary people couldn't master the 140+ gestures the device had for text editing and page turning or why people weren't prepared to radically alter their handwriting for the device to understand what they were writing.

AT&T had great plans for the device and ran adds on major TV networks in the USA showing a girl on a beach using it. "One day you will be able to fax from a beach." was the ads tagline. However, though I've been to a lot of beaches up and down the California coastline I must say that I never felt the urge send a fax from any of them.


One other problem with the EO was it was expensive not just to buy but also to run: simply emailing a handwritten note scribbled on the EO's screen such as "Honey, please put the dinner on. I'll be home in 20 minutes." would cost more than actually stopping off on the way home to buy a 3 course takeout meal due to AT&T's per byte model of email.

Haven't we come a long way! In almost 20 years things have predictably become smaller, cheaper, faster but moreover our access to information has changed radically and with it our expectations...