Ah! I have one of these in my basement! (The kind of "battle scar" you have from being involved with educational software long enough.) Palm, for me, illustra

Ah! I have one of these in my basement! (The kind of "battle scar" you have from being involved with educational software long enough.) Palm, for me, illustrated the possibilities of mobile computing the first and best for the time. In the educational space, the alphasmart was an incredible promise. Through the educational software company I worked for at the time I did some work on software for the Alphasmart, Newton, and emate. Unfortunately, this stuff didn't really take off, though in hindsight it was clearly just a matter of an idea being ahead of itself. BTW, there are still some things modern devices can learn from the alphasmart. E.g., it's not indestructible but generally you can drop/throw one around pretty casually without breaking it. likewise, the OS and user environment wasn't "delicate".