Happy 10th birthday

I've never been good at remembering birthdays as all my family can attest to. I would probably even forget my own if it weren't also that of President Bush (tongue firmly planted in cheek). So it's no surprise that I missed the 10th birthday of one of the inventions that has changed my life. But at least it wasn't that invention's fault.

For years I carried around a little black appointment book in my shirt pocket - a habit that I picked up when working for Long Beach Community Hospital when I also carried around 3 or 4 IBM Hollerith (80 column) cards in my pocket to take notes. Each year I would carefully transcribe to the new appointment book all the recuring appointments and contact information that I had in that black book. Fortunately, it was only a couple of hours work, a day at most. And as the year progresses, I would carefully cut off a corner of a page each week making it easy to quickly "tab" to the current week.

My first real contact with a PDA was the one that Ron Penrod kept for the stake president with all his appointments and the upcoming agenda items for stake meetings. I was impressed with how well he could call up information that he had stored weeks before. I looked at several and we even bought one once we were assured that it could be backed up on our desktop computer. But it was large, slow and cumbersome. It languished, for the most part, in Carolyn's purse.

I saw the Palm announcement on March 27, 1996 but didn't see that is was any different than what we had already tried out. I waited for a year for Palm to work out the bugs and see if others would come on the market. I didn't trust the "Graffiti" handwriting language that made humans conform to the computer rather than the other way around.

When I finally conviced my employer to buy me one, it was an immediate bond. I don't think I've been away from my PDA except during vacations (and not always then) for more than a few hours. I've gone through a progression of Palms from the Palm Pilot to the Palm Pilot III to the Palm V. Then I jumped ship to the Pocket PC ipaq series manufactured by HP and using Windows CE 4.2. I'm convinced they will continue to get more powerful and useful. I certainly don't know what I'd do without mine.