Gadgetory

hey guys this is Evan blossom talking now back with another throwback gadget that will make you appreciate your modern daily driver all that much more so this time around I thought we'd check out a device that makes last episodes palm 5x look practically modern in comparison the chart wizard oszi 7600 better known as the wizard 32k hailing all the way back to 1991 this version of the wizard predates the original palm pilot by over five years although you've probably noticed that it's classic clamshell design is still being utilized in the electronic dictionaries that seemed to be all the rage in Korea and Japan the first thing you'll notice about the 7600 is its QWERTY keyboard standard on many smartphones today but considered somewhat revolutionary in the early 90s in fact the first member of the wizard 7000 series had a portrait clamshell design meaning that it opens like a book and featured a frustrating ABCD keyboard layout that most likely missed trained a generation of thumb typists now they didn't call this the wizard 32 because there were 31 models predating it believe it or not this personal digital assistant came preloaded with the grand total of 32 kilobytes of storage memory but what if you needed more than 3% of a megabyte to store all your addresses and calendar entries while the wizard 3032 had you covered with this exceptionally large expansion slot which in this case is packin a full 32 kilobytes of flash native storage like the compact flash in SDIO slots that came after it this expansion Bay allowed the user to add functionality to the device as well one could also purchase a variety of non memory modules such as a dictionary card and a variety of games best of all the cards could support up to 20 buttons which were triggered by pressing on this plastic covering worst of all a watch type battery was required inside the cards themselves making permanent data loss of frequent occurrence for those of you who remember a sitcom called Seinfeld starring a comedian of the same name you may recall an episode where in Jerry's father distributed Wizards to fellow condo dwellers for use as tip calculators of course being a comedy he actually purchased a lot of knockoff devices with Mitch miscalculated tips and led of course to some very comedic situations now 32 kilobytes wasn't going to stay the norm forever and Sharpe quickly came out with smaller more compact models with more memory like 256 K but that did not have the expansion slot from the older models much more pocketable and probably a lot more stylish well that's all the retro fun we have for you today good viewer but please tune in next time as we take a look at some of the devices which have helped shaped our lives and the gadgets in our lives thanks again for tuning in