Back in 1997, I had a slicker mobile office setup than I have now. This was largely thanks to the Franklin Electronics Rex PC Companion. Here’s a picture of the little fella…
This thing was awesome. It was about the size of two credit cards glued together. The whole thing could be placed in a laptop’s PC-Card slot (then called PCM-CIA) and sync’d with Outlook. It ran on two watch batteries that literally powered it for months at a time.
The screen was a modest black-and-white 160-by-98 pixels, and the whole thing only had 5 buttons. But it worked like a champ.
Picture this: Prepare for a trip and sync your laptop with your desktop. Get to your destination, update your calendar, to do list and notes on your laptop and download it all to the Rex. Put the Rex in a shirt pocket and walk to the tradeshow with all the information you need for the day contained in just a few ounces of electronics that never failed, never locked up, almost never ran out of battery life and could easily be READ in bright daylight…
Sadly, the Rex never really took off. I think it was mis-marketed — too many folks thought it was a replacement for a PDA. Since you couldn’t enter data, those folks were always disappointed when they tried it. But back then, PDA’s were awful. Palm’s ate batteries as though they were candy and Windows CE was mostly a disaster.
But as a device to carry data, the Rex was second to none… and it spared me many pounds of luggage on many occasions…