Modems and external dialers.

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 18:40, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Why?  Handheld touchtone generators were very common in the
> the early 90's.  Even the late 80's.  I bought mine in Radio
> Shack.  They were often needed if your employer used an in
> house private phone network (like MMDS where I worked) or
> a phone accessed Email system (like IBM's PROFS) because
> the phone company had this habit of turning off the keypad
> on payphones after the first connection.

This may be a European thing, I don't know.

This wasn't a phone-dialling device or anything. It was a tiny pocket
computer, but unlike something like an HP 95LX, it was a GUI machine
with a diary, address book, word-processor, spreadsheet and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3

It wasn't the first "digital diary" of course, but it was the best.
Ultimately a later, ARM version of the OS became the basis of Symbian.

But the fact that your pocket address book could dial the phone for
you -- not by being a keypad or anything, just by picking it up,
looking for Bob and pressing DIAL and then holding it near the phone
-- was impressive for its time.

One of my favourite things to do with its successor model (the Series
5) was pull up an address entry, and when someone pulled out a Palm
Pilot and starting trying to scribble Graffiti into it, to stop them
and transmit the contact to them by IRDA. Most Palm owners had no idea
that their devices spoke infra-red and for them to get a whole contact
instantly by wireless was deeply impressive to them.

-- 
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