“There’s nothing new under the sun, some folk say, and that’s certainly true of Palm’s recently announced Foleo. It’s the palmtop reborn in a slightly sexier, slightly larger form. Even its name is reminiscent of that bygone arena – it’s rather like the Atari Portfolio, the world’s first palmtop PC, released in June 1989.”
…the first pocket sized computer!
On 1980, Tandy released the TRS-80 PC-1. It was a pocket-sized Computer. BASIC was built-in.
It had optional, Cassette or Printer/Cassette interfaces.
The Printer/Cassette interface was n fact a mini dot matrix printer!
Later Tandy released the PC-2 and the PC-3, the latest was smaller than the 2 previous models.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=937&st=1
I was thinking Tandy too, but the Foleo reminds me more of the Model 100 / 200 portables.
… is apparently thanks to the combination of a Linux OS and Flash based storage (from the Wikipedia article).
Would be nice to have that on my laptop.
It would be real nice if the whole OS is stored in Flash ROMs on all computers, laptops especially, with updates taking place similar to the way in which the BIOS is flashed (with enough space for feature updates and the ability to easily upgrade the flash module). But alas such a feature is just impossible for PCs (due to lack of standards and lack of interest in such standards).
Perhaps devices like the Foleo could show a thing or two to general purpose PC manufacturers. But then again maybe not, what with people running towards the latest and the greatest without stopping to think about the real improvements gained.
for the foleo to teach pc makers anything about flash, as several have already announced and Samsung is already shipping, laptops that use flash instead of hard drives.
I remember when they came out, thought they were awesome and craved one for some time.
IIRC in the movie Terminator 2, John Connors used one to rob ATMs and crack a security door. Of course they didn’t come with those features out of the box 😉
Damien