Sharp Wizard

The first Sharp Wizard electronic organizer was the "OZ-7000" released in 1988, making it one of the first electronic organizers (PDAs). The OZ-7000 was about 6.1 inches (155 mm) tall, 3.5 inches (90 mm) wide closed, 7.25 inches (184 mm) open, and 0.75 inches (19 mm) thick closed, making it much larger than current PDAs. It featured a connection port to attach to a Windows PC or Macintosh, an optional thermal printer and cassette tape backup, 32 kibibytes of memory, a 40 by 16 character black and white LCD, and an expansion slot for accessory cards.

The functionality of the "OZ-7000" included a memo pad, a telephone pad, calendar and scheduling with alarms and repeating events, multi-time zone clocks, and a calculator. All the basics found in PDAs since. The keyboard was not QWERTY, although later models changed the orientation of the screen and keyboard to allow that.

The expansion cards were about the same size and shape of PC Cards but predated that standard and were incompatible. The slot was behind touch sensitive plastic allowing for up to twenty "buttons" on the card. The original selection of cards included memory expansion cards, a thesaurus dictionary, and some games.

The "OZ-8000" followed, with a larger screen and more memory, and opened in landscape rather than portrait orientation. Later Wizard organizers were smaller, dispensing with the expansion slot and soon bore little resemblance to the original "OZ-7000".

The later Sharp Wizards were something between an electronic databank and a PDA. They were small, lightweight devices with keyboards but no touch screen running on a Zilog Z80.

The model numbers start with either "OZ" (for the USA, a prefix that's meant to be a pun on The Wizard of Oz) or "ZQ" (rest of the world) followed by a number, for instance "ZQ-770" is a non-US organizer with 3 MB memory.

Trivia

* The organizer was spoofed in the Seinfeld episode The Wizard when Jerry Seinfeld gave one to his father, Morty, who perceived its only function to be a "tip calculator". Morty tried to give organizers to board members of his condo association as gifts, because Jerry supposedly had gotten one at a discount price. Jerry can only get them from Bob Sacamano's father and they turn out to be low quality imitation Wizards, "Willards", which don't even calculate tips correctly.

External links

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* [http://downloadnow.ath.cx/STATIC/manifest/wizard/Organizer%20downloads/ Over 350 applications/games for the Sharp Wizard ZQ-770PC (and other models)]