Electronic Organisers...

[Last updated July 2026]

Or should that be "Organizers"(1) or "Personal Organizers"(2), or "PDAs"(3), or Digital Diary(4)?

1 - Because I'm British (even though the devices in question may have Americanized labelling).
2 - "Personal organizers" might mistakenly refer to the paper versions, such as the Filofax.
3 - PDAs, or Personal Digital Assistants are more capable devices, such as a Compaq iPaq, or a Psion.
4 - ...as per my most recent acquisition, a Casio SF-8000 'Digital Diary'.

Electronic organisers were in in the 1990s and being a youth of the 90s, and British, the Argos catalogue was my staple for impending birthdays and Christmases. My siblings and I would eagerly await the bi-annual release of a new catalogue so we could start dreaming of and listing all the things we'd like to have, not always from the children's toys sections, but anything from furniture for our future homes, to electronics and gadgetry.

I wanted an electronic organiser; they looked cool, and with memory capacity increasing year on year I wanted a decent one...

The RadioShack 128K:

What I ended up with was a 128K RadioShack model from a Tandy shop; I think it must have seemed like a good deal at £49.99 when that would only buy you a 64K organiser from Argos.

I filled it with the names and addresses of friends and relatives, notes, and weekly schedulings of what I wanted to watch on TV by scouring through the Radio Times (another British stable, a TV guide). This was a practice I adopted after staying with my grandparents who would take the time to highlight what they each wanted to watch in their TV guide; but back at home I had to share our Radio Times with three siblings, and my parents, so instead I would borrow it for half an hour (or however long it took), schedule in all what I wanted into my Organizer, and return the guide back to my mum, until the next one arrived the following week. Eventually I did actually fill my 128K Organizer, because I never deleted events after the fact, and there was no "purge" option (that I can recall).

Really that's all I ever used it for. I filled it, and couldn't bring myself to reset it, by probing the little hole on the back (something annoying kids would do to other gadgets at school...) Eventually the batteries ran out (3 x CR2032 I believe) and by that point the cost of those batteries just didn't seem worth it; the device was already out of date and the novelty had worn off. At some point I dismantled the thing, curious about how it looked inside, and it never went back together, so it went in the bin. One thing I didn't like about this particular organiser was that the hinged cover didn't fold all the way back, like to double back underneath itself like others could, and it seemed like the little plastic lugs that formed the hinge could be easily snapped; I was careful with it though and this surprisingly never happened.

I have fond memories of such things, and times, as you can probably tell; I wish I had just boxed it away for the next 20 years, like I should have done with everything else I ever owned and ultimately chucked or otherwise parted with.

Really the device was a gimmick, just as I think much of tech is. There's a lot of these kinds of organisers available for cheap on ebay. More on this in a moment.

Lotus Organizer:

A few years later, when I bought my first Windows PC, running Windows 98, it came with Lotus Smartsuite 1-2-3, which included Lotus Organizer. I really liked the aesthetic.

Sadly, with the software tied to my computer, it wasn't much practical use. I wish there would be some modern day app that had a similar aesthetic.

The Compaq iPAQ:

In 2021 I acquired a Compaq iPAQ H3970 PDA selling for what seemed like a good price. It was deemed to be virtually brand new and complete in its original box that was just a bit worn.

However, as I should perhaps have expected, the battery was not functioning. Seemingly it was too old and had been left for too long with no charge. The seller agreed to partially refund me when I pointed this out and I hoped I might be able to find a replacement battery for it...

Sadly, nowhere seemed to have the right battery. It's a Li-Polymer 3.7V but has a proprietary piece of circuitry attached, likely for power/charging/battery regulation.

My Options:

 - perhaps I could coax some charge into the battery (this is quite risky and should be done with care)
 - or, find a similar battery pack and transfer the necessary circuitry

I also picked up a keyboard dock that is pretty neat as the keypad retracts [later found to be faulty].

[Some time later...]

I sourced a Li-Polimer 3.7V battery of a size that would fit the space occupied by the original battery (which needed some heat to remove). However, rather than remove the charging circuit from the original battery (sorry I can't find a picture of this), I piggy-backed the new one in its place, and surprisingly this worked. I now had a fully functioning iPAQ.

During the course of some months I intended to use the iPAQ for daily scheduling and other tasks, I was keen to dabble in the OS, but really I simply found myself playing endless rounds of Solitaire to the point the screen was getting marked by the stylus from this act alone (the top left corner where you tap the stack of cards, and 'swipe' marks were now noticeable on the display), so I elected to list the device on ebay.

[April 2024] "Sadly" my iPAQ got sold. I'm sad that I never really used it as I had intended, but I was seeing how prolonged use was going to add to the wear of the screen which was pristine when I received it.

3Com PalmV:

In around May 2024 I acquired a 3Com PalmV (below). While with the Compaq iPAQ I mostly only played solitaire on it, before selling it on, the PalmV I used for a while like the RadioShack Organizer; I scheduled in some things and maintained a To Do list, both things I find an actual paper organiser and simple little notebook to be far more capable, cheaper, and most notably, far quicker to deal with - I can flick through pages at ease and scribble things in, or cross stuff out in seconds - none of this tap-tap-tapping away on an undersized little keyboard or onscreen with a stylus. Besides a gadget perhaps having a search function, it is generally more convenient to flick through actual pages to find something, the brain recalling a vague scribble and/or the position on a page. But alas, I'm still drawn to the electronic counterparts. Most people now use their mobile/cell phones in place of such gadgetry, while at this time I preferred my not-a-Filofax and dumb-phone.

You'll notice the wires protruding from the side of the PalmV above. That's because it came to me not working; the battery was long since flat and I had no dock to even attempt to charge it. I found a Youtube video showing how one guy had removed the metal back of his PalmV; it required a hairdryer and pry tools. Using my heatgun I attempted the same, but it took quite a bit more effort than was shown in that video due to the adhesive used to glue the back on. I think another solution might be to instead use WD-40 as a solvent. Hopefully I hadn't bent the rear cover for when it comes to putting that back on.

Anyway, I didn't have a direct replacement for the battery, but at this stage I just wanted to test the device. It just so happened that I had been given a few old satnavs to test. One of them was working but required maps to be purchased for it which just wasn't worth it so I dismantled it to retrieve its battery. It was a larger battery, but looked like it could be used, being the correct voltage (3.7V). The plug was different, it had three wires, but I was able to slip out the little metal contacts from the plastic plugs and swap things over (hence the stray wires, they're from the old battery).

The setup process first involves calibrating the touch screen with the stylus (something that needs to be re-done every once in a while), and then you get a tutorial on writing using the Palm's "Graffiti". It's a quirky input method which on the Palm has to be inputted into the bottom section of the screen and can vary with other devices that have a similar feature, so if you learn one, you might struggle on another - It took me a while to get to grips with it. You can tap the bottom left of the box to call up the onscreen keyboard although somewhat annoyingly you can't use both methods at the same time and have to close the keyboard to input in the box again.

I then used the PalmV until pretty much that cobbled-together battery ran out, since I had no way of recharging it in the device, although I had been using it for a couple of weeks and iin that time it was still above 75%. Peter's Pilot Pages shares the pin-outs for the dock, so someone could potentially rig something up to charge the device without having a proper dock.

Casio SF-8000 Digital Diary:

In June 2026 I got my hands on one of these...

It was fully working and in its original box, and importantly included the user manual.

This Casio is an early version from the 80s; quite an impressive piece of kit back in the day, and stupidly expensive. Like my RadioShack Organizer I had in the 1990s with its 128K, that cost £50 and was a big Christmas present. But for the Casio to be from the 80s with half the RAM, must have cost £000s.

The time wasn't set correctly so I had to try and figure out how to do that... and jeez it was complicated. Reading the manual gave the impression that the unit would have good time-keeping precision so I thought I would set an alarm for the morning... that took half hour of trial-and-error-button-pressing, and head scratching. In the manual every process involves a specific and archaic sequence of button presses.

The way I've come to understand it is that the screen doesn't really convey much in the way of a user interface as we are now more familiar with, but is more of a raw output of the contents of memory - there aren't really headings or icons (as my later digital organizer in the 1990s had), although the calendars and daily schedule are somewhat graphical. Instead, all the buttons form the various commands and functions, and you're pretty much shifting that data about on the screen; therefore you need the manual in order to know and learn the sequence of commands in order to get anything done, and then a lot of practice.

There's basically a chapter in the manual devoted to each of the sections of the device. Page 98, for the 'Schedule Keeper' amused me when it begins with "Entering data [here] is actually quite simple....", as if it's more straightforward than the preceding sections (it's not!). The remainder of that chapter is 16 pages...

One of the fun quirks here is you are instructed, as one method, to ender the Calculator mode in order to ender a date that you wish to search for in the Calendar/Schedule Keeper. Indeed, if wanting to search for a phone number in the Telephone directory, for example, you have to remember that names are inputted/stored before them and thus such a search has to include a blank field for name, and then the number, with a "Combine" command between them. Or if you search for Joe Blogs by searching for "j" or "B", it'll return no results.

The one thing I feel this model lacks is a backlight.

While the unit was initially somewhat frustrating to use, I realised it's largely down to being a "difference way of doing things". Modern devices are generally "intuitive" and have a common, and therefore, familiar interface (not to mention often being touch screen and utilizing an app). This Casio is from a different era and I can appreciate that my brain just wasn't grasping the process. This is intriguing me, like being faced with all of the buttons on a scientific calculator; not having the foggiest idea of what they're all about, but wanting to know. So, I wanted to get to grips with this Casio organiser, and become that suave person I would have looked at in awe as a child, coolly inputting things into my neat gadget, like a man of the future... whilst being stuck in the past!

I spent some evenings working my way through the manual, section by section, carrying out the example procedures. Now it's July and I'm amusing myself by inputting any key things I need to schedule.

The device features a data transfer port, for either communicated with compatible devices via a short cable (which I don't have), or with a desktop computer with additional gadgetry which the manual explains.

I looked on ebay and may have come across something that might work, I'm just waiting for it to arrive...