They don’t make them like that any more: the Xircom REX 6000 PDA
I imagine that anybody interested in the history of technology has heard of the Palm Pilot PDAs, that were wildly popular at the beginning of the millennium. These iconic devices were the first, truly successful pocket computers, although they were not the first consumer PDAs – the Psion Organizer range was already well-established by that time.
The Palms could manage calendar and contact information, and store short documents. They had a graphical display, unlike the early Psion devices, with a handwriting recognition pad. They were a trendy and productive alternative to a paper pocket diary, which was the only realistic alternative at the time, if you didn’t want the bulk of a Psion. The Palm III could synchronize to a PC, using a desktop docking station and a serial cable – a real, RS232 serial cable in those days.
The problem with the Palm and Psion devices was their size – or so it seemed at the time. In a weird reversal, of the kind that often happens in consumer electronics, many people are now carrying around smartphones with huge screens, that are bigger and heavier than a Palm III. Still, we tended to consider the size as a disadvantage twenty-or-so years ago.
And so the REX. Even if you’re interested in the history of technology, you may well not have heard of this device. It actually appeared on the market around 1997, produced by the Franklin company, which was better-known for its pocket dictionaries and translators. But it didn’t enjoy its brief flare of popularity until Franklin sold the rights to REX to Xircom, which was itself purchased by Intel in 2001.
What made the REX 6000 special was its miniscule size. It did the same kinds of things that the Palm and Psion products did, but it did them in a package little bigger than a credit card. When I first saw one – in one of the many electronics shops that used to populate London’s Tottenham Court Road – my eyes almost popped: I’d never seen anything like it, and I knew immediately that I had to have one.
Almost the whole surface of the REX device was the LCD screen, as you can see in the photo:
What’s less clear from the photo is that this device is, in fact, a PCMCIA card. At the time of the REX, and the Palm III, almost every laptop computer had a PCMCIA slot. Typically these slots were used for connecting external disks and network cards. REX’s innovation was that the entire device was a self-contained PCMCIA card.
So, in principle, keeping your REX synchronized just meant plugging it from time to time into the PCMCIA slot on your laptop. If you didn’t have a laptop, there was a PCMCIA-to-serial adapter for a desktop computer.
Unlike the Palm devices, REX didn’t have handwriting recognition. You had to enter text using a tiny virtual keyboard and a stylus (which was included). This was less a problem than it might seem because, in practice, users did most of the actual data entry on a PC. The REX was supposed to synchronize to Microsoft Outlook, although it came with its own, PC-based PDA application as well. There was also an online service, rex.net, that provided news articles and weather forecasts that you could transfer to the REX.
The REX was a technological marvel, and ought to have been a success. With the REX I could keep all my contact details, appointments, and to-do lists in my wallet, along with a couple of ebooks (I had better eyesight in those days). It wasn’t all that expensive – about £100 in 2001, which is about £200 in today’s money.
The REX did not fail because it was too expensive, or because some better product displaced it. It failed because Intel, its new owner, was not interested in it. Intel most likely did not buy Xircom to get its hands on the REX: probably Intel was interested in Xircom’s PC network adapters, which were very popular. The REX would have seemed like an out-of-place oddity to Intel. So, within weeks of Intel’s taking control of Xircom, they closed down the rex.net service. The bugs in the REX Windows software – and there were many – were never fixed. And so users drifted away, and potential customers continued to use their Palms or Psions until, presumably, the rise of the smartphone.
During its short life, the REX had an enthusiastic user and developer community, although probably not as vigorous as the Palm community. Still, enthusiasts managed to produce a number of useful add-on applications, despite the total lack of support from Intel. The REX used a Z80-compatible CPU, so there was no shortage of tools that could produce code for it. The real problem was the lack of documentation on the device’s internals. It was also difficult to use it in any productive way under Linux. To be fair, the Windows software was so buggy that there wasn’t really a productive way to use it under Windows, either – REX never really got past the proof-of-concept stage under Xircom, and Intel’s lack of interest prevented it going further. It was the lack of Linux support that led to me selling my REX – only a few months after buying it so rapturously – something I now regret.
No other portable computing device had the form factor of the REX in 2001, and none has now. To be fair, there’s no demand for a PCMCIA-shaped pocket computing device, because nobody uses PCMCIA any more. But there’s potentially a demand for a credit-card computer, when we consider what could be packed into a device this size with modern technology. But these days we’re so welded to our smartphones that any REX-like device faces insurmountable competition.
If you want a REX 6000 in your collection, you can still find them on on-line auction sites. But you’ll have to be patient, and be willing to pay more than you might expect. You probably won’t able to do anything useful with it – unless you’re willing to run Windows 98 and put up with the terrible, buggy software. But the hardware will probably work fine, because these devices were indestructible. And they used widely-available, user-replaceable batteries: something that modern manufacturers would do well to emulate.
