Mobile Computing Mania

 In October 2025, I reconnected with one of my mentors, Rich Wallace, former editor-in-chief of EE Times. On a long phone call, we discussed, among many other things, his animus against the Wintel juggernaut. I finally understood why he hated the PC industry, why he didn’t share my passion for covering its rocket ride, my first big arc of a story in U.S. tech journalism.

For Wallace, it was a sad denouement to the frothy energy he witnessed as a young reporter in the early 1980’s. He recalled his enthusiasm for the early days of Apple, the Homebrew Computer Club and the other innovators of the pre-PC days. He was working at Electronic News, a forerunner of EE Times.

“That period was the most exciting I ever witnessed. No one knew what was going to happen.

“I was a reporter in the suburbs, a young dad with a station wagon who got invited to a party upstate where a handful of geeky people in the kitchen talked into the night.

“There were 20 processors and eight operating systems that all wanted to coalesce into some point product you could call a microcomputer. But once Wintel got established, it pushed out all the other alternatives, they corporatized and commoditized the technology.”

Wallace’s excitement about the early PC days described my fascination with mobile computing.

From my first days as the EE Times guy in Hong Kong, the best stories were about laptops and handhelds. The products were all too heavy, expensive and slow—useless really. But with chips getting ever faster, cheaper and smaller it was only a matter of time until something better came along.

For nearly 20 years – through the 1990’s and beyond -- tech reporters like me chased that something.

Hewlett Packard's 200LX palmtop

One of the many rabbit holes I explored was the Palmtop PC, a device about the size of a case for eyeglasses that opened to reveal a tiny black-and-white screen and a chicklet keyboard running the ancient DOS operating system. A consortium of PC makers in Taiwan gathered to spec out the concept of this organizer-on-steroids. It was one of many dead ends, a frustratingly useless product, but it was on the road to something. better

Like most of the pioneering products of mobile computing, it suffered from being too early. The display didn’t display much, the processors and memories that could run on batteries couldn’t process or remember much, and the batteries themselves didn’t last long. But slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, engineers were making all those elements better.

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