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Sharp electronic organizers with the IC card slot (Wizard OZ/IQ/PA/PI series)
06-10-2021, 11:01 PM
Post: #45
RE: Sharp electronic organizers with the IC card slot (Wizard OZ/IQ/PA/PI series)
In today's slightly off-topic post, I want to talk about Sharp's competitors in Japan. Despite the company's leading position in its home market, it has had quite a few of them. Here are the most notable three of them.

First on the list is Sharp's longtime "rival" and the main competitor - Casio. The pioneer of the digital organizer back in 1983, the company was caught off guard when Sharp released PA-7000 in January 1987. Only after six months, Casio released the DK-1000 organizer, capable of displaying kanji, but it did not have the competitor's IC card slot.

It wasn't until mid-1989 when the company was able to counter-attack with the release of the Casio DK-5000. It had a widescreen display capable of displaying almost twice as much information as the then-current Sharp PA-8500; it also had twice as much memory and, finally, an IC card slot hidden inside the device. The organizer was equipped with five dedicated buttons below the screen to operate the card. Each of them was responsible for a particular function depending on a specific card. In this case, the bottom line on the screen displayed the five buttons' descriptions, which slightly reduced its usable area but was a justified solution.

[Image: Casio1.jpg]

[Image: Casio2.jpg]

The company released about ten organizer models, some of which were subsequently adapted to Western markets as part of the SF line. I also have a DK-7200 (unfortunately, it doesn't turn on) and one of the later models - DK-E810. It is notable thanks to the inclusion of EPROM memory in addition to the RAM memory. The organizer automatically copied contents of the RAM into EPROM to back up the data from loss in case both the primary and backup batteries die.

[Image: Casio3.jpg]

[Image: Casio4.jpg]

As for the IC cards, their assortment is much smaller compared to Sharp's offerings and totals just over 50 items, including Japanese and Western variants. Casio produced new card models until 1996, when Sharp was already actively adopting the software distribution for Zaurus/PI PDAs via floppy disks or online networks.

[Image: Casio5.jpg]

The next competitor is the NEC PI-ET1, introduced in August 1990. As some of you probably know, at the time, NEC was the leader in the Japanese personal computer market, and its PC-98 family was a standard like the PC XT/AT in the West. Seeing the success of Sharp in the personal organizers market, NEC decided to develop its own solution. It teamed up with Hudson Soft, which already helped the company design the PC Engine game console (TurboGrafx-16 in the US). Hudson Soft created firmware for the device, official development tools, and one of the few game IC cards.

[Image: Nec1.jpg]

[Image: Nec2.jpg]

The PI-ET1 itself had many attractive features: a Z80 processor that was well-known to developers, a barcode scanner, a dedicated 4-directional pad with two buttons for menu navigation, and convenient game controls (hello, Game Boy). Software-wise, it had a built-in human face editor, which could be used to assign a simple avatar to a phone or address book record. Japanese hackers quickly found a way to write assembly language programs directly on the device itself without buying official development tools.

[Image: Nec3.jpg]

Unlike personal computers, NEC could not gain a foothold in the organizer market, and the PI-ET1 did not have a successor. As a result, only 11 IC cards were produced, four of which were gaming cards. Since I don't have any of them, I'm including someone else's photo below. As you can see, the cards were about half the size of the Sharp and Casio counterparts.

[Image: nec4.png]
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RE: Sharp electronic organizers with the IC card slot (Wizard OZ/IQ/PA/PI series) - Akuji - 06-10-2021 11:01 PM



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