Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

Expanding the possibilities

Once upon a time, someone came up with an idea for an expandable handheld computer. Actually, there have been a lot of handhelds over the years (going back as far as the 70's) and expandability is nothing new. What made this one different was the people behind it -- the same people that made PDA a household term.

Yep, the three wise men (slash woman) who made the Palm Pilot a standard executive tool went on to create a new company with new innovations. That company was Handspring. Their Visor line of PDA's featured the ability to add hardware and software with their Springboard modules. This was a great idea that just didn't take off the way it should have.

Someone, however, figured out that not only was the Springboard connector physically identical to the PCMCIA standard, it was darn near the same thing electronically too. Knowing that, they figured that a PCMCIA-to-CompactFlash adapter just might work with a little rewiring. Well, it did. Of course, hardware without software isn't much good to anyone. And that's why Dave Kessler of Kopsis Engineering gets my hearty thanks.

Dave Kessler may have even come up with the original idea; identifying that first hacker would require more research than I have time for right now (but really should be done!). Nonetheless, Dave worked long and hard on the software that not only made the FlashAdapter concept work, but made it a stable, usable application. Dave put in a huge amount of time on a project that would never make a profit, and yet would help the visor community immeasurably.

I have nearly nine megabytes of applications on my flash card, and (before my old card died) had more than ten megabytes of images as well. Keep in mind, too, that I've not reloaded everything I had before the crash yet. Every morning, at 8:30am, the visor's internal memory is automatically backed up to the CompactFlash card. I've got several applications which not only run from the flash card, but also keep their data there.

I have another visor with a flash card containing an early version of Mapopolis and a bunch of maps. Everything runs off the memory card; the visor has nothing except the Kopsis drivers and utilities. I have an EyeModule2 (a Springboard-format digital camera module) and if I swap out the camera for a FlashAdapter, I can use another application, eyeSplit, to move the pictures onto the memory card as JPG's. And yet another FlashAdapter has a copy of bDicty and some dictionaries, again, all on the memory card.

During the development of the software, Dave worked tirelessly with the user community, answering questions, fixing bugs, releasing updates, sometimes on a daily basis. The later versions of the software wasn't free, but the cost was so minor that there is no way he could ever have been adequately compensated for his time. I'm not sure why he did it, but I'm sure glad he did. I have a FlashPlus module in my visor 24/7 with (now) a 256MB flash card and his software in the built-in flash of the module.

Someday, I may upgrade to a new PDA, but I will still be thankful for the gift Dave gave me and a whole lot of others.