In October, 2006, I started typing away into my Treo 700p, using a series of full-sized keyboards which included this one:
Treo With Keyboard
I never typed atop a tree stump, but hey, why not? I carried these keyboards everywhere, folding them in half and stuffing them in a shirt pocket, happy to have a writing outlet from which I could communicate straight to the Internet, but without the bloat of a laptop.
I started at the Treo about a year after my father died, after a year of writing letters. For the better part of 2006 I wrote hand-written letters. Long, long, rambling letters to friends and near-strangers. After wearing out my welcome in that realm I turned to this, and when I got the posting-from-Treo thing figured out I made the content public but invisible to the drive-by traffic that comes from public search engines. I buried any links to the stuff deep within this site, such that I do not know how many humans ever found it until I made the links more visible a year or so ago.
At first I used a posting system that was primitive, and which produced a series of pages that were virtually impossible to navigate. I liked the limitations and the aggravations it produced, as I think it forced me to focus on the words and not the style. Still, in my memory it was a lot of heavy shit. I would hate to re-read that stuff, and I hope I never do. About a year ago the last of my keyboards smashed to bits, all the little keys scrambling away into wordless chaos. Since then I posted mostly just images from the cameraphone.
It surprised me how surprised others were to see this setup. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s this type of arrangement was common enough, though never as common as laptops today. In corporate realms a laptop computer was a token of status, and as such they were handed out to those individuals who needed them the least. While CEOs and executives hauled their Micron laptops and IBM Thinkpads from one bogus junket to the next their document-spewing underlings got Palm Pilot PDAs with full-size keyboards, amounting to a portable office that fit in one’s shirt pocket. Maybe this setup was not as common as I think, but whatever the case the foldable keyboard is nothing new.
I never used this contraption at home. I carried the devices almost everywhere I went, and when I unfolded the keyboard and placed the Treo on top I almost always drew questions from curious passers-by. Like a magician pulling endless bunnies from a hat it appeared I had magically summoned a mini-laptop computer from an impossibly small space.
If these reactions surprise me then the only thing that surprises me more is how uncommon this setup seems to be these days. Save for myself I do not think I have ever seen it in the wild.
I have been nostalgic for the old Treo after upgrading this week. “Upgrade” does not exactly express how I feel about this transition. It is not a retrograde, or a downgrade, or a lateral transition. But it has been amazingly aggravating to transition from a trusted gadget whose limitations I had memorized to a slick, sexy, multi-function-everything device made by people far smarter than me.
The Treo had to go, though. All that remains is for me to get the phone numbers from the Treo to this thing, a task made more complicated than it should be for reasons too lame to explain. I guess I must be getting older because I no longer look forward to advances in technology. Endless software upgrades and rapid-fire presumption of hardware obsolescence has infested not just technology but the immediacy of ideas and communication.
