Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!uunet!fernwood!portal!cup.portal.com!Jake-S
From: Jake-S@cup.portal.com (Jake G Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.handhelds
Subject: Re: Don't Panic - a dream
Message-ID: <43362@cup.portal.com>
Date: 16 Jun 91 00:55:17 GMT
References: <7444@acorn.co.uk>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 32

A couple of weeks ago, Andy Smith wrote:

> I once had a dream, It consisted mainly of taking a manufacturer,
> Encyclopaedea Brittanica, TimeLife books and Douglas Adams; then rolling
> them all together to work on a project.....
             .
             .
             .
> However if HP were to take the 95LX case, install the 48S as a calculator, 
> then using current 4mbit EPROM/ROM technology put a compressed version of 
> the Brittanica in with a dict/spell chk/theus (about 32Mbyte), they could 
> produce something that would be very useful to many people.....

Personally, I think that putting a scientific calculator into the HP95LX
case is a bad idea. As a plug-in card to the '95, that's okay, but making
a calculator that is a horizontal clamshell just doesn't cut it for quick
use. There seems to just be no way to use the '95 with one hand to hold
it and the other to punch keys if you're standing up and/or moving around.
Since the HP95 has a QWERTY keyboard which assumes that people will be typing
on it, that seems to imply using at least one finger on each hand to punch
the keys. If this is the case, then the machine must be sitting on a hori-
zontal surface. Yes, some folks can type with one hand while holding the
machine in the other, but I don't consider this the norm. However, the HP48
case (and the HP41 case, and that of all the other vertical-format machines)
lend themselves really well to punching keys one-handed and on the go.

For those of us who think handheld number-crunchers are tops, I'd like to
see a vertical-format machine which has the Intel CPU compatiblility so a 
plug-in DOS card would work, but would still have one-key-per-function
math capabilities built in (at least as a kernel).

Jake Schwartz