HP11C emulators?

That's a simple question to answer. A male is about as likely to get laid wearing a calculator holster as a pocket protector. ;-) The calculator holster inherited its reputation from its predecessor, the slip-stick scabbard.

There are DOS browsers. My Compaq 486 ran Mosaic, IMHO the most stable browser there ever was.

That would be a problem, although the Compaq had it.

Not a technical problem, can be done. But of course not at today's speed. For some reason all my business files back then fit onto a 3-1/2" floppy each month. Now a 670MB CD ain't enough. Bloat?

I am very comfortable with the good old map ;-)

Or what we think is necessary ...

SW-incompatibility is what makes that approach de-facto useless for most engineers.

That's the point. A PDA screen would be what I'd consider the bare minimum. However, those things don't run Windows-SW and IMHO that is what caused them to never reach any popularity to write home about.

Yep... this is why Windows will continue to be a major force in the desktop OS market; it's largely self-perpetuating now!

(It's also a little ironic when you consider that hard-core engineering software was, at one time, almost entirely UNIX-bsaed...)

There are significant economic factors in play here, though -- you probably paid far more for your 486 and 8086 Wang than you would for a decent laptop today. When memory and MHz are the next best thing to free, it's no surprise that bloatware is the order of the day.

PDAs are quite popular with business people since the basic calendar/contact manager/bit of web browsing/etc. needs have been quite well met by existing software... but I agree that for engineering there's very little available (although, as mentioned in another thread, scientific calculators seem abundant... :-) ).

Happy new year!

---Joel

Market forces at work. Some good, some not so good.

That was right after the era when engineers had the time to write their own Fortran programs. No more.

Actually, no. I paid about $800 for the Wang and about $1200 for the Compaq. Ok, my 386 desktop cost me north of $7k.

Memory and MHz may be cheap. But what good does that do when the useful battery life is a paltry 2hrs versus 5-6hrs in the good old days? And back then it was all low capacity NiCd. Imagine what these machines could have done with LiIon.

Also, other than fluff I don't see that much productivity increase. Basically I am doing the same stuff with computers that I did in the early 90's except that it's now all rendered in hi-res and color and quits to render half way through a flight.

If they had not gone down the road of the boutique OS their market share and shareholder values would be much larger today. But it's water under the bridge. The PDA had it's day and the world has moved on. I actually caught myself last month not buying a product because it was PDA-based. Subconsciously it felt "old".

Same to you and your wife!