On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 18:40, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > Why? Handheld touchtone generators were very common in the > the early 90's. Even the late 80's. I bought mine in Radio > Shack. They were often needed if your employer used an in > house private phone network (like MMDS where I worked) or > a phone accessed Email system (like IBM's PROFS) because > the phone company had this habit of turning off the keypad > on payphones after the first connection.
This may be a European thing, I don't know. This wasn't a phone-dialling device or anything. It was a tiny pocket computer, but unlike something like an HP 95LX, it was a GUI machine with a diary, address book, word-processor, spreadsheet and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3 It wasn't the first "digital diary" of course, but it was the best. Ultimately a later, ARM version of the OS became the basis of Symbian. But the fact that your pocket address book could dial the phone for you -- not by being a keypad or anything, just by picking it up, looking for Bob and pressing DIAL and then holding it near the phone -- was impressive for its time. One of my favourite things to do with its successor model (the Series 5) was pull up an address entry, and when someone pulled out a Palm Pilot and starting trying to scribble Graffiti into it, to stop them and transmit the contact to them by IRDA. Most Palm owners had no idea that their devices spoke infra-red and for them to get a whole contact instantly by wireless was deeply impressive to them. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053