There was a period in the 1990s when it seemed like the personal data assistant (PDA) was going to be the device of the future. If you were lucky you could afford a Psion, a PalmPilot, or even the famous Apple Newton — but to trap the unwary there were a slew of far less capable machines competing for market share.
[Nick Bild] has one of these, branded Rolodex, and in a bid to make using a generative AI less alluring, he’s set it up as the interface to an LLM hosted on a Raspberry Pi 400. This hack is thus mostly a tale of reverse engineering the device’s serial protocol to free it from its Windows application.
Finding the baud rate was simple enough, but the encoding scheme was unexpectedly fiddly. Sadly the device doesn’t come with a terminal because these machines were very much single-purpose, but it does have a memo app that allows transfer of text files. This is the wildly inefficient medium through which the communication with the LLM happens, and it satisfies the requirement of making the process painful.
We see this type of PDA quite regularly in second hand shops, indeed you’ll find nearly identical devices from multiple manufacturers also sporting software such as dictionaries or a thesaurus. Back in the day they always seemed to be advertised in Sunday newspapers and aimed at older people. We’ve never got to the bottom of who the OEM was who manufactured them, or indeed cracked one apart to find the inevitable black epoxy blob processor. If we had to place a bet though, we’d guess there’s an 8051 core in there somewhere.
Bingley bingley beep…
Does it recognise handwriting?
Definitely not. It’s a piece of junk.
I had the same model. I bought it on clearance in the late 90’s. It was very limited but pretty good at keeping phone numbers. The memo pad was pretty clumsy but you could make a little note, but good luck finding it later if you made more than a few notes.
All in all, better than a Palm Pilot because the battery didn’t constantly run dry and it was pretty cheap. I think retail price was around $30-40 at the pharmacy. (don’t get me wrong, I really loved my Palm IIIx)
I can tell you’ve never read the Guards series of Pratchett books.
That would explain the reference I did not get. :)
The discworld books are on my list of things to read, but I’ve not read a single one of them. My wife loves them though.
I liked the point-and-click game for DOS. And of course we watch Hogfather every year. But I’m totally ignorant of Pratchett minutia.
“…and it satisfies the requirement of making the process painful.”
One of the most elegantly subtle back-handed compliments seen / written in a very long time.
That was actually the stated goal, so not really back-handed.
Oh wow I had this one. My father gave it to me to play with and it was so horribly bad. He didn’t want it either. Tried it for a few weeks before I threw it out.