It's interesting the various visions that were out there at the time. I was keeping track of it as I was an enthusiastic user of my HP200LX, and could tell the

It's interesting the various visions that were out there at the time. I was keeping track of it as I was an enthusiastic user of my HP200LX, and could tell the general idea of a computer fitting in your pocket and talking to the internet was a very potent one, even though the internet at the time was email, usenet and ftp. General Magic was a big one, as was the Newton, though both were obviously too expensive to achieve serious market penetration. Geos was another important one; it was a pretty slick OS that could have beaten Windows or been the birth of a palmtop OS. One of the striking things; lots of people really believed the only way to use a pocket computer was with handwriting recognition. The Palm "graffiti" tool for achieving this was pretty obviously never going to work (aka teach people a new form of handwriting) compared to keyboards. The fold away keyboard of the HP OmniGo was kind of an admission of this.