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In the beginning, people stored addresses, telephone numbers and dates in little books. Sometimes called organizers, these paper books were popular and some became fashion statements. A particularly famous one was the luxurious leather bound Filofax. In the 1980s, new technologies enabled the rise of a new category of electronic tools to try and replace those books and those devices. Innovations take us right into the modern era of smartphones. In this sprawling, globe spanning video, we look at the personal digital assistant, the pda. This video is brought to you by the asianometry Patreon. The first companies to produce devices to try to replace these paper organizers were the Japanese makers of pocket calculators, which makes sense since they already had LSI expertise and CMOS semiconductor technology for it. In 1980, Sharp released the PC 1210, widely considered to be the first pocket computer given a full QWERTY keyboard. Its big differentiation was that users can write programs on it using the basic programming language. In 1983, Casio released the PF3000, the first electronic organizer. The key selling feature for that one was an address book that stored a person's phone number and name in katakana, the phonetic Alphabet, not kanji, the crazy Chinese one. The organizer had a program to help sort those entries, which was seen as a significant improvement over paper address books. Sharp quickly brought out their own organizer, and over the next few years, new functions like clocks, schedulers and alarms were added. In the mid-1970s, a mathematical physicist from the UK named David Potter crossed the pond to spend some time at ucla. There he saw the power of some of the first microprocessors and became silicon pilled. When he returned to London, he took a risk and founded Potter Scientific Instruments, or Scion, essentially because he wanted the acronym to read sci, which he liked. He convinced a few of his doctorate friends to join and they started writing software for the zx, a home microcomputer produced by Sinclair Research. At first utilities like databases, then small computer games for people to play, like Space Raiders, a Space Invaders clone. The latter turned out to be more profitable. Scion then partners with British computer makers like Sinclair and Acorn. And riding the PC boom, they grow into one of the largest software distributors in Europe. But these were smart people and tiny video games did not quite stretch their wings. They wanted to do more. David Potter also cited a desire to move away from being so reliant on a few computer partners. This weakness became startlingly clear when Scion invested a lot of resources on a big office suite for Sinclair's Sinclair Quantum Leap home computer. However, that leap stumbled out of the gate with key reliability problems that dooming the QL to market failure and leaving Scion with a real jolt. So what to do next? Potter says in his oral it was Charles Davies and I in a Greek restaurant saying what are we going to do? The PC at this stage was beginning to come out, but they were expensive and they weren't mobile, so you'd have one per office where 10 people would use the same PC. So the idea of portable computing, the idea that people had personal information, although it was alien to most people, that was our great idea. People really did have personal information and we should build a device for that for ordinary people. In 1984 they released the 8 bit Organizer One, their first hardware device. Selling for about 99 British pounds. The Organizer One had a basic calculator like keyboard and and a 1 line 16 character LCD screen. The whole thing was powered by a Hitachi 8bit CMOS processor. In terms of software, it had a searchable address database for storing personal data and it can be programmed using an application pack that enabled basic like programs in its own programming language. Like you can bring up functions for calculating things like factorials. One of the device's key differentiators was its adoption of EPROMs for storage. EPROMs, a precursor to NAND flash memory, differ from DRAM because they retain their data even when the power goes off. And that was a big deal because before that you had to use tape cassettes for mass storage. Totally impractical for a handheld device invented@intel. EPROMs are notable for their unique method of erasure, and if he wanted to erase anything, he pulled the chip out of the device and held it under ultraviolet light for 15 minutes. The goal at the time was to make an electronic diary for yuppie type individuals profiled as Nigel. Nigel is between 25 and 35 years old, works in middle or senior management, and is conscious of current technology innovation trends. Nigel sounds like a bit of a tosser. The Organizer didn't quite resonate with the Nigels, but retailers like Marks and Spencer and other small businesses found it rather useful as a stock checking tool. In the 18 months after its release, Scion sold 30,000 organizers1. With the product's use case somewhat validated, Scion works on the next iteration, the Organizer 2, released in 1986 at a price of $250. The Organizer 2 remained an 8bit device but featured a few new hardware changes like an improved EPROM flash memory that eliminated the need to expose the memory cards to UV light for erasure but the most striking change was the software. The Organizer 2's larger RAM let it add extra capabilities with the help of expansion packs. With these $50 $130 packs, the Organizer 2 can calculate financial equations, look up terms in its dictionary, translate things, and more. The Organizer 2 can also read Lotus 1, 2, 3 spreadsheets, though you had to awkwardly port the sheets over from a desktop PC using a commslink cable, like as if you were trading Pokemon on the Game Boy. And just like the Game Boy, you can attach a variety of bizarre and hilariously imbalanced gadgets to the organizer 2. My personal preference is Rabone's ultrasonic measuring system, which bears spiritual brotherhood with the Game Boy Pocket Sonar. But did Rabone bundle in a fishing minigame for when you run out of things to ultrasonically measure? Checkmate. The organizer 1 and 2 sold well enough to attract attention from competitors. These electronic organizers the the Casio Boss and Sharp wizard were popular both in Japan and abroad, had common features like an appointment diary, calendar, phone directory, clock, calculator and notepad. And if necessary, you can connect them to traditional computers for syncing or buy IC cards to expand original functionality. Articles at the time discussed how they let people type up notes on the go, enabling business travels. One interview subject who carried both a laptop and organizer discussed how he used I carry both the Sharp wizard and my Toshiba. The Toshiba stays in the hotel room for telecommunications, major database access and word processing. The wizard is in my briefcase for quick note taking, calculations, telephone, contact lookup, scheduling, calendar and alarm functions. But for most people, these electronic organizers were pricey, bulky, and worked no better than a paper appointment book and calendar. In fact, they worked worse because you can't draw or sketch in most of them. The first generation of organizers like the Scion ran operating systems called embedded systems. These are the anonymous oss that run your microwaves, control machines, and whatnot. Embedded is called that because the software is embedded into the device, often inside read only memory or ROM chips. Since the chips are read only, they can be very fast, but limited storage capacity meant that these embedded systems were not all that functional. Early on, the folks at Scion recognized that if they wanted their handheld device to be everything for everyone, then it needed a powerful software platform platform, meaning operating system plus applications. The transition from 8 bit to 16 bit microprocessors offered an opportunity to do that. So in roughly around 1987, the Scion team began work on a new 16 bit operating system called Epoch. The company has always said that Epoch stands for Epoch, as in a new epoch. But rumors continue to swirl that it meant electronic piece of cheese. As you might expect, producing a new OS from the ground up for a very small 16 bit single board computer was astoundingly difficult, and they struggled with this over the next two years. Meanwhile, the American computer makers took a different crack at the market. If the laptop shrank the PC desktop and turned out to be a huge success, why not keep shrinking? This led to the proliferation of palm top computers and to a lesser extent, wrist top computers in the late 1980s. In 1989, Atari released the palm top pioneer, the Portfolio. This little computer was actually produced by a British company called dip, founded by former Scion employees. Notably, the Portfolio's operating system, called DIP DOS was compatible with Ms. Dos. Several other palm Tops of the era that did it this way include the Pocket PC and the Hewlett Packard 95 LX. The latter also had Lotus One2Three built in, which was pretty impressive. These devices were meant to be computers just small, so they looked like shrunken down laptops with tiny keyboards and screens, as the Portfolio's marketing put it. The Power of the IBM PC in the Palm of youf hand In 1989, Scion released their own Palm Tops. The mobile computer. There was a MC200, 400 and 600. I'll focus on the 400. Many retro computing websites have profiled this device, so let me just hit the main bits. Powered by eight AA batteries for 60 hours of uptime, the MC400 costs about £895 at release time, which would translate to about $3200 today. The MC200 and MC400 did not run Ms. DOS, but rather the first version of the aforementioned 16 bit Epoch operating system. Epoch 16 Epoch had a GUI with Windows icons, menus and pointers navigated with one of the first touchpads available on a palm top computer. Reviewers generally liked the device, albeit with a few nits, and they remained popular amongst the retro computing communities because many of its features seem ahead of its time. But market wise, the MC was a resounding flop. The company's own internal postmortem reflected on the MC's very high release price, a lack of DOS compatibility, and early teething issues with the Epoch book. For example, Scion's programming language opl, which had fostered a cottage industry of third party applications for the organizer over the years, did not yet support the graphical elements for the mc. Meanwhile, competitive pressure was mounting on the little British company. Scion had gone public in 1988, and profits hit a high of 3 million pounds in 1989. The following year, profits then crashed to just 550,000 pounds. Their stock fell from a high of 285 pence in 1990 to just 58. Potter blamed the underperformance on the acquisition of a modem business called daccom. But revenue growth in their core Organizers business was slowing, so all eyes were on the next organizer, the Series 3. This machine's development began with a single question. What did they want this device to be, an Organizer or a computer? And the development team at Scion made a fateful call. Believing that enough people would be familiar with computers by now, they decided to make their next Organizer a computer. Leveraging their experiences from developing the MC400, the Organizer Series 3 got a full QWERTY keyboard. Extra time let them give the Epoch some polish and the the features expected of a normal desktop word processor, application, spreadsheet, scheduler clock, and even modems for communications. The screen was 240x80 pixels and was about 4 inches diagonally. Size wise, the whole device was about 6 inches by 3 inches and weighed 255 grams, which is the equivalent of a Red Squirrel from the British Isles or a partially full can of Soda. A faster x86 CPU fabbed by NEC allowed the machine to run on just two AA batteries, but even so, the engineers struggled to find a place for those batteries. The only solution was inside the hinge between the screen and keyboard, giving the whole thing a clamshell design. Released in autumn 1991 and priced at just £195, or about $300, the Organizer Series 3, or just Series 3, was the right product at the right time. Scion expected to sell maybe 5,000 units per month. It ended up selling over 100,000 units right out of the gate, and 20,000amonth. Scion began work on a successor targeting the next generation of microprocessors. They started a new 32 bit version of Epoch. More on that later. But when it and its new hardware arrived at the scene, the product landscape will have drastically changed. Just because these palmtops can run desktop software does not mean that they should. Their cramped screen and keyboard left an iffy user experience, leading to more than a few reviewers asking whether the benefits were worth the costs. Was there a better way to handle all this? While at Xerox PARC in the late 1960s, legendary computer scientist Alan Kay brewed up a concept that he called the Dynabook, a powerful portable computer that can be navigated with a pen. Over the years, he preached the tablet thing around the valley and gathered many adherents. While it remained more of an ideal, actual pen based computing products were starting to break out into the market. The pioneer was Grid Systems, a subsidiary of the computer maker Tandy. In 1989 they released their GridPad, an Ms. DOS tablet computer equipped with a special handwriting recognition software that helped workers in the field quickly fill out repetitive forms. Despite costing $5,000 in total, the GridPad sold very well 10,000 units by 1991. The team that developed it was led by a neuroscientist and Berkeley PhD dropout named Jeff Hawkins. Remember that name? Over in Japan, Sony releases the Palm Top PTC 500 in 1990. It did not have a keyboard, so the only way to input text is to write into boxes using a connected capacitive stylus to recognize characters. The the Palm Top used fuzzy logic, which evaluated a person's writing using a bunch of inference scoring rules that output between 0 and 1. You sum up the results to get the final decision. It worked pretty well. The Japanese used fuzzy logic and other consumer devices, rice cookers most notably. Despite the name, the Palm Top was about as large as a medium sized textbook, 8x2x 6.3 inches and and 1.4 inches tall. It was also very expensive at about $3200 at the time of release. But those are the kind of things that Moore's Law would address in the coming years. Analysts claim it was going to be the next Walkman. It wasn't. Despite some success domestically, it remained in Japan. The GridPad success inspires a boatload of pen computing startups, perhaps the most well known of which was Go Corporation, founded in 1987 by Jerry Kaplan, former chief technologist at Lotus and backed by the legendary VC John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. After seeing a demo, Doerr invested $1.5 million into Go later saying that pen based computing reminds me a lot of the kind of goosebumps I felt when I first saw Lotus. 1, 2, 3, end quote. Go made the PenPoint operating system, which let users do things by writing. Someone can delete a word by circling and then drawing an X over it, or italicize that word by drawing a squiggly line under it. By 1991, pen computing was the technology rage of the era and overall observers judged penpoint the leading contender. It was later used by NCR Corporation for a line of tablet computers and given the Controversially lusty name Model 3125 Penpoint being an OS, however, must have rung a thousand alarm bells up in Redmond, Washington, setting Bill Gates off onto a holy Crusade. In early 1991, Microsoft demoed a penified version of its Windows 3.0 OS, Pen Windows. Gates would later say that he considered pen computing to be the next step of the evolution of of human computer interface. But Gates likes to say things like that anyway. Pen Windows was not as well received or reviewed as PenPoint. But if you know Microsoft, you will also know that that doesn't matter. Kaplan later writes a fantastic book called A Silicon Valley Adventure, in which he recounts the full force of the 1990s Microsoft Steamroller and the kind of pressure that it can exert from on potential hardware partners. Let us go back to Alan Kay's Dynabook. One of his followers was Apple CEO John Sculley. After waiting a power struggle that saw co founder Steve Jobs leaving, Sculley became Apple's new product visionary. And with Apple Computer behind in the booming PC clone market, they needed him to vision up a new hit product. So Sculley presented a second generation DynaBook that he called the Knowledge Navigator. Describing it more in aspirational terms than technical ones. Apple put out a few high concept videos about it in the late 1980s. The Navigator would be a discoverer of worlds. Drive through libraries and museums, have an adaptive keyboard, be networked, give you wings, and so on. Great idea. Now they gotta make it. Am I right? Apple had started on a few small pen computing projects in the late 1980s. In 1991, Apple consolidated them into a single project called the Newton. What Sculley most insisted upon was that the device had to be small enough to put into his pocket or fit into the palm of his hand. Early on, the Newton used a low power CPU fab by AT&T called the Hobbit, which Apple and AT&T worked closely on customizing for the Newton. But the chip turned out to be buggy and ran too slow and cost too much. So Newton lead Larry Tesler turned to a British company called the Acorn computer company. But since Acorn made computers too, Apple invested $3 million to form a joint venture between themselves, Acorn and the chip company VLS High Technology. Out of this joint venture came a new chip called the Acorn Risk Machine. It's the basis of today's army led by the legend Sir Robin Saxby. ARM goes on to pioneer its current business model of licensing ARM IP to customers. This of course becomes a huge success and ARM eventually IPO'd in 1998, Apple's 47% stake earned it $800 million for its $2.5 million investment, money that it desperately needed at the time. Funnily enough, Go and a British company called EO Limited have been working on a pinpoint powered tablet OS, too. After Apple ditched them for Acorn, AT&T invested in that project and got them to switch to using the Hobbit CPU. So a swap in 1992, Scully finally presents the new device to the world, noting how it converged communications, content and computer into a single device, not wanting it to call a PC or a personal communicator, he called it the Personal Digital Assistant, and the name has since stuck, which is surprising considering that we are already 12 years into the history here. Sculley said that one day billions of PDAs would be sold around the world, and though he was early, he was right. But the quote was mischaracterized as him saying that the Newton would sell billions of units, and which was not right. Released in 1993, the $900 or $1,950 today, Newton famously did not sell well, and it attracted the wrong attention for its handwriting recognition software. Reviewers complained that it couldn't tell between their ones and zeros. The cartoon strip Doonesbury what is that name? Mocked it for a whole week. And the Simpsons TV show ran an episode where the device misread Beat Up Martin as Eat Up Martha. Apple eventually improved all these issues, but the product nevertheless did not catch on. After selling 40,000 units in its first week, the device then sold 100,000 over the next two years. In an interesting retrospective, Tesla reflects on navigating opposing studies about what the Newton should be. One anthropologist felt it would sell best to firefighters, nurses and policemen. So something akin to the gridpad, a different focus group run by a few of his cohorts concluded that the Newton should be like the Sharp wizard, an organizer for professionals on the go. Both studies, however, made two common conclusions. First, the device had to accurately read natural handwriting. Interestingly enough, this one turned out to be very wrong. The second thing, which turned out to be very right, was that it should have a cell connection. The Japanese company Sharp was Apple's hardware manufacturing partner for the Newton, chosen for their expertise with LCD panels. Apple also licensed the Newton OS to Sharp, who then made a line of expert pads with it. Yeah, Apple licensed out its oss back then. Sharp expected to sell millions of these expert pads, but ended up selling just 10,000. Sharp quickly snuffed it in 1994. But in another part of the company, a small team had been working on something else. With a front row seat to the Apple Newton dumpster fire, they focused heavily on shipping a good handwriting recognition system, building on top of work done for a previous project that flopped in the market. Called the Sharp PV F1, that new team added a second CPU just to handle the complicated handwriting recognition. They also shrank the whole device, leveraging Sharp's then leading semiconductor manufacturing capacity. In October 1993, just two months after Newton's debut, Sharp released the Czarist PI 3000 in Japan. And it was an instant hit. The Tsarist, yes, it was named that to evoke thoughts of dinosaurs, spawned a popular PD line that lasted for over a decade. Like the dinosaurs, there were many different iterations, including those with BlackBerry like keyboards and the open Linux os. In his oral history, one of the leaders behind the GridPad, Jeff Hawkins, recalled the fever dream surrounding pen computing in the early 1990s. Hawkins believed that people took the wrong lesson from the GridPad, the only device that actually sold. In his view, Go Microsoft, and everyone else was too focused on the pen and making the best handwriting recognition algorithms and whatnot. As Hawkins recalls in his oral history, there is no pen computing industry. You guys are all wrong. There is mobile computing, and the pen is part of that. But as long as you keep thinking that pen computing is what it's all about, you're just going to miss it. Hawkins had seen the rise of Japan's PDA products like the Sony Palmtop, but finding them very Japanese like and difficult to use, he thought that he could make something like that, but with a better interface. So he raised money and founded Palm Computing to make a consumer gridpad, later named the Zoomer. Yes, I know Zoomer. To build it, they partnered with a consortium of tandyradioshack, Casio, Intuit and aol. And as you might expect, such a large and strangely adversarial committee approach created a product only a committee can love. Sold in October 1993, about the same time as the Newton and the Czarist, Zoomer cost too much. $700, and at the size of a paperback book and 2.5 pounds, it was still too big and it ran slow. Contrary to the name, it didn't zoom. Changing a phone number took 20 to 30 seconds, and this was a chip issue. The processor ran slow because Casio had insisted that the device have 80 hours of battery life on AAA batteries. So in the end, like the Apple Newton, the Zoomer flopped. Palm begged Tandy and Casio for more ads. But all the marketing in the world couldn't save this turd. The Zoomer's failure put Palm Computing on the brink of going under. Things looked bleak with both the Newton and Zoomer flops, plus the once hyped Go and EO floundering. Who wants to do another PDA now, let alone a Zoomer 2 Hawkins had produced an interesting new handwriting recognition system called Graffiti, a shorthand that he likened to touch typing. It could potentially fix the handwriting issue. But now it seemed too little, too late. Frustrated, Hawkins and his CEO, Donna Dubinsky, visit one of his investors, Bruce Dunleavy. After listening to the two complain about their partners abandoning them, Dunleavy asks, I don't want to hear you complain about this. Do you know what you should be doing? Hawkins said that he would start over again with a new product and and do it the right way this time. Dunleavy then hits them with the well, why don't you do that then? So Hawkins goes home and carves a small model out of hardwood and a chopstick stylus. He then carves a little cradle that you can put the thingy onto with a single button for syncing. And that got them off and running. Critically, Hawkins and Dubinski approached this new product from a different angle than the Zoomer. This one was not trying to do everything. It was just trying to do a few things well. As Dubinski later said in a newspaper interview, the approach we were all taking before was to say, we're going to take the PC and shrink it into this little box. There was this implication that it had to do everything the big box did. What we realized after having some failures was there was a different approach, which was to assume the handheld is a component of of the bigger system. In other words, this device will be a PC accessory, not the next PC. This led to a few compromises. Articles will later note that you can't print stuff from this device. You had to sync a dock to a PC and then print it from there. But most people adapted from there. Palm added a few core principles. It had to be small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. It had to be priced at under $300. Its UI had to be instantly responsive, fast on, fast app switching. All that and the PC sync process had to be painless. After spending just $3 million on development, Palm convinced the Singaporean OEM giant Flextronics, to assemble what would eventually become the Pilot. Launched in 1996, the PalmPilot was very small, about the size of an iPhone4 but a bit thicker. It had a 3 by 5 inch screen, a small planner, address book, memo pad and to do list. And the Palm immediately took off. After the 1996 Christmas season, the pilot had 70% of the PDA market. In the 18 months after its release, it sold a million units. Many Years later, in 2011, John Scully reflected in an interview with David Grealish for the Mac Observer. The brilliance of the PalmPilot was it didn't take much technology to create the synchronizing engine and a storage device that would let you hook up to any personal computer and download your contact list onto this little device. The brilliance of it was that it took a real problem and solved it in a very simple way. We, on the other hand, with Newton, took a very complex problem and were solving it in a very sophisticated way. And I wasn't experienced enough to know that it was actually going to be maybe 10 or 15 years later before the things we were envisioning with Newton became practical. To improve the product's usefulness, Palm released an SDK to let developers build third party applications for the handheld. Popular ones include Documents to go, an office DocViewer, a database app called Handbase, and Quicken for personal finance. Now, wait just one second. That sounds a lot like an operating system. By God, that's Microsoft's music. So for the second time, we have another operating system to challenge Microsoft. And for the second time, Bill Gates heads off on crusade, telling people that they were going to kill Palm or wipe them out. Hawkins and Dubinsky start getting condolence emails asking them what they would be doing next. It's hard to imagine the fear Microsoft inspired in those days. I earlier mentioned pen Windows, which had been an awkward pen computing bolt on to the Windows operating system. It quickly became clear that the latest Windows Windows 95, with its staggering, unconscionable, apocalyptically, cosmically high demand for eight megabytes of RAM, would not fit onto handhelds. So in 1995, the two Microsoft Teams, one focused on pen computing and another on social interfaces, merged to work on a new kernel from scratch. The internal codename was Pegasus, but it would later be called Windows ce. The CE didn't mean anything in particular. Windows CE had been written from the ground up with the goal of creating a familiar companion to the Windows desktop. If someone had used Windows 95 before, they should know CE immediately. In practice, however, this created a cramped UI with menus, Windows, and even the Start button on a tiny screen. Microsoft announced Windows CE at CES in September 1996. The first CE1.0 PDA devices soon after arrive NEC's MobileGear MCK1 and Casio's Cassiopeia A10. Looking as big and ugly as the first palm tops. They flop in the market, and Palm lets out a small breath. But Microsoft is nothing but relentless. A year later, 1997, Windows CE 2.0 arrived, correcting many of 1.0's issues and adding a cornucopia of new features like color screen support, an improved networking stack, and far better Windows Office applications. Windows CE didn't have the IBM boosted lead like its big brother had in PCs. Nevertheless, many in the industry predicted that Microsoft would eventually, inevitably win the PDA market. That predicted apocalypse never arrived, at least for the rest of the decade. Windows CE 2.0 and 3.0 not only failed to overwhelm Palm, but even lost share against it, falling to 11.2% in 2000. Palm's share, meanwhile, stayed in the 60 to 80% range. They did not lose this dominance until 2003, and that story is reserved for another day. I shall also note, by the way, that a similar thing happened in Japan. Windows CE failed to crack the twin dominance of Sharp, Czarus and Palm and was left mired in a far distant third place. Let us close with our old pals at Sion. Since the release of the successful Series 3 in 1993, Scion kept itself busy with incremental model updates. With more memory, faster ports and speedier software, they eventually sold 1.5 million units in total. In 1994, they began work on a new 32 bit version of its Epoch operating system, nicknamed Epoch32. But the PalmPilot's breakout success and Microsoft's rapidly improving Windows CE product raised the stakes. Even as the company worked on its next hardware product, the Series 5, they faced constant questions about impending irrelevance, third parties and analysts confidently saying that if Scion did not license their software to outside partners, then they too will fall like Apple and IBM. In July 1997, Scion released their Series 5 hardware. Yes, they skipped the Series 4, maybe because it means death in Chinese. Unfortunately, despite good reviews, the Series 5 did not sell very well, and worse yet, it had cost 10 times more to develop than the Series 3, leading to a profit warning for the second half of 1997. The share price had surged in 1996 but took a dump. Due to this lower profit as well as fears over Microsoft, the questions and second guessing intensified. Can Scion and the Palm top continue to fend off Windows and the Other PDA challengers Internally, Scion started working on its next transformation. The mid-1990s saw the rise of cellular and the 2G GSM standard. As cellular phones got more popular, handset giants like Nokia and Ericsson started adding PDA like functionality to their devices. In 1996, Nokia released its Nokia 9000 Communicator, an advanced headset with a clamshell setup and QWERTY keyboard. Considered one of the first true smartphones, it can make phone calls but also send emails, faxes and take notes and calendar events. Nokia then reached out to Scion about a collaboration, perhaps looking to gain Scion's expertise in mobile computing, or to avoid a fragmented rat race of mobile OSes, or form a grand coalition against Microsoft's growing interest in Europe's mobile phone space. All the above can also be true. Together they formed a joint venture. Potter split out Scion's software division and had them work epoch 32 into a new multitasking OS called Symbian that will be adopted by Nokia, Ericsson and late A.D. motorola announced in June 1998. Scion's stock soared and Symbian went on to dominate the mobile phone OS market in Europe for the next ten or so years. Until something happened. Throughout the 1990s, the Futurists and thought leaders had talked up the notion of convergence between all the devices of people's lives. So instead of a standalone device for calls, a standalone device for PDA functions, a standalone camera for pictures, or a standalone walkman for music, one device. By 1999, it had become clear to observers that mobile convergence was starting to happen not only in the birth of Symbian's PDA and mobile phone operating system, but also the rapid rise of the BlackBerry device, a device that both took calls and sent emails. So the PDA's future was then not as a standalone device, but as a feature inside of a larger ecosystem. The question then was who can get there first? Those from the cell phone Space or the PDeMobile computer space? The race to win the smartphone industry was on. Alright everyone, that's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the Channel, Sign up for the Patreon and I'll see you guys next time.