jpo@cs.nott.ac.uk (Julian Onions) (01/07/87)
Its that time of the year again when diaries have to be updated. I was wondering if technology is advanced enough nowadays to build something similar to the diary but electronic & portable. The best definition I've seen of such a thing was in Arthur C. Clarke's book "Imperial Earth" chapter 18, To quote :- " Duncan's minisec was a parting gift from Colin, ... The 'Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what could fit comfortably in the normal human hand. ... There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had a virtually unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation - for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode. Thus on ALPHA-NUMERIC, 26 of the studs bore the letters of the alphabet, while ten showed the digits zero to nine. On MATHS, the letters dissapeared from the alphabet studs and were replaced by X, +, divide, -, =, and all the standard mathematical functions. Another mode was DICTIONARY; the 'Sec stored over a hundred thousand wods, whose three line definitions could be displayed on the bright little screen, steadily rolling over page by page if desired. CLOCK and CALENDAR also used the screen for display ..." There is more about voice recording and data available only with the correct passwd etc. for privacy and the ability to hook up to a large screen. So what we have is something the size of a walkman which has a display, some buttons with configurable designs a lot of memory and a small operating system. The question is, how close can we get to this with present technology? I think I heard of efforts to put the OED (oxford english dictionary) on a chip, the display could be done with LCD technology I guess - as could the buttons probably. For the amount of data stored, bubble memory might be useful - if it works! The software would seem fairly easy, the diary program could be adapted from other sources the rest seems to be mainly database stuff. Storing speech is probably a bit much for digital technology as it tends to be voluminous and an audio tape unit would probably be too big to incorporate. Would anyone with a better knowledge of the hardware be willing to comment on the viability of this? Other ideas I'd like to see are Data dump/retrieve ports for reading & dumping info. And something I could see a big use for would be a bar-code reader - or equivalent. I could envisage lots of things having written and bar-coded instructions - For instance I go to catch a train, I go to the timetable, pick the train I want, then read in the time & change information into the minisec and have it all to hand. Similarly information about events, I see a concert advertised and read in the time/place/price etc. Extension packs for specialist information, e.g. timetables, city directories. -- Julian Onions