On my birthday in 2009, I bought myself one of the first IoT consumer devices – a cute electronic rabbit, called the Nabaztag.
It was brilliant – it could rotate its ears, read out messages, tell the weather and air quality forecast, play music, “sniff“ and recognize RFID tags, blink lights, and even act on voice commands. I consider the Nabaztag to be the great-grandfather of Alexa and Cortana.
I recently stumbled over the Atari Portfolio. It is the first handheld computer, released in 1989. It runs a (compatible) version of DOS 2.11 and is sheer beauty!
I got one on eBay to play with it and soon realized that it’s mainly a pretty plastic brick as you have a hard time accessing it with modern computers.
Hey, long time no hear. I hope you are still around and haven’t given up on me. The last two months were quite busy, so I didn’t find the time to write. Sorry for that.
But I have a long list of things I want to tell you. This post will be a short update on the things that have kept my attention.
When I tell people that I build physical prototypes (a.k.a things with knobs, displays, and wires, which demonstrate how physical user interfaces of products that are going to get built will work) they usually smile, often sadly, and say: „Yes, but that’s easy for you since you are such a nerd.“
That’s of course a grand misconception. Of me (probably) and the general situation as a whole. People still believe that extensive programming and electrical engineering skills are needed, but that is no longer true. The nerd barrier has been torn down in quite a few places.