Today some part of that past crept into my mind in the form of the Apple Emate Newton. We used these in middle school which for me was from 1998-2001. Starting in 6th grade, a teacher would roll a cart full of these durable, translucent plastic things into the room (I had first period math class, where they were most used in my case) and we used them to do things we could have otherwise done on paper.
But they were novel. Heavy for their size and very sturdy feeling. They had a display that was lcd with a glowing backlight similar to my Timex Indiglo and a stylus that could be used to draw numbers and letters. You could draw a character and it would turn it into the number or letter you wrote out. Pretty interesting stuff for it's time. A favorite feature of us kids was to 'x' something out which made the x'd out thing explode on the little screen. They had the ability to talk to each other with an IR port as well, like a Gameboy Color. That must have been all the rage for simple data transfer in the late 90s, and it is still pretty cool.
We used a tip of the iceberg's worth of features on those Newtons but just interfacing with something like those contributed to us being able to use technology better as a whole that the generation before us. We definitely were right on the precipice of the tech we use today in the late 90s.
The novelty of things like these was so great back then. I remember being super interested in a type of texting walkie talkie. The idea of talking to a friend in another class covertly was incredible. I think they claimed a 500ft range! I never got one of them, but having a phone you could text on wasn't even a thought to us in 1998. A quick search tells me these were probably the Cybergear text messenger, if you're interested.
I couldn't find much on them.
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| Exactly as I remembered. |
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