First PDA: IBM’s Port-A-Punch
October 21st, 2008
Maybe the Apple Newton MessagePad wasn’t the first personal digital assistant (PDA) after all.
No, that designation may be reserved for the IBM Port-A-Punch (above). The Port-A-Punch was a handheld punch card marker developed in 1958 for on-the-spot data recording, like statistics and inventories.
Punching holes in punch cards was an exact science, however, and Wikipedia tells us that the punched holes were too “fuzzy” to be accurately read. Punch cards were the USB flash drives of their day, even as far back as the 1800s, storing all kind of information. It’s pretty amazing to think about, especially considering the giant stacks of cards needed to store data. There’s a spot in this computer history video where a guy trips, spilling his two-foot-high stack of punch cards and ruining an entire computer program. Whoops.
Check out more about the Port-A-Punch at IBM’s history page.
[Image courtesy of Wikipedia.]
