The History of Mobile Calendars (Part 1)

Organisation has been a prime requirement of everyone who walks the earth for as long as we have ‘walked the earth’ and the holy grail of organisation emerged in 1921 called the Filofax. The name was derived from an earlier moniker, file of facts, and was similar to a product designed in 1910 called Lefax. As you will know, the Filofax system did not gain worldwide acclaim for decades, and when in 1976 David and Leslie Collischon started a company to sell the Filofax brand by mail things started to move forward.

The 1980’s were the boom time for the Filofax style of organisation and the Yuppie (young upwardly-mobile professional) crowd clung to their Filofaxes as a badge of honour to show that their lives were important enough to require such an item. It was a time of huge greed and the endless pursuit of money and material items acted as a lesson to us all as the inevitable crash occurred a few years later. Well, it should have acted as a lesson, but here we are today in the exact same situation. Today the Filofax has been largely replaced by the BlackBerry and other smartphones, but meetings, things to do and all manner of other notifications to remember are signalled to us automatically by the familiar beep which has invaded our lives like a friendly form of tinnitus.

As computers started to encroach on our lives in a way no one ever expected, the PDA was born and two early pioneers attempted to organise our lives digitally. Apple produced the Newton and Psion came up with the Series 3, both of which opened up the gates to the field of dreams we consider the smartphone world to be today. The Newton was a bulky affair which included some applications that were way ahead of their time, but the handwriting recognition issues and price meant that it would never achieve a status outside of the crowd which would usually adopt something so new and seemingly complicated. The Psion 3, on the other hand, managed to bring all of the aspects of organisation a person needs to one small unit in a way which was familiar to anyone who required good organisation.

Psion cleverly mimicked the Filofax / desktop calendar look in its calendar application and also included automatic alarms and just about every other calendar feature we use today. There are many people who argue that the calendar application found on the Psion 3a and 5 series PDAs has never been beaten by any PDA since, and I am one of them. The landscape screen setup obviously helps a lot when displaying two halves of a day (AM/PM) and Psion took advantage of the available space perfectly.

I still see people using Psion 3 series PDAs this day, 18 years after the first model was introduced, and that sums up how well designed they were. Sadly Psion’s lack on ambition removed it from the mobile market and this made room for Palm to take up the reigns and present us with a new style of PIM to play with. More on that in part 2.