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I did my first ereading on an HP95lx palmtop with MS-Dos 5.0. I think it was 5.0. It was basically an MS-Dos computer sold in 1991 by HP that fit comfortably in a pocket. It weighed 11 ounces and was 99% compatible with full size MS Dos computers that didn't use protected mode. This was before Windows was popular so protected mode wasn't common.
It was bigger than today's phones but not by a lot. It used 2 AA batteries for power and they'd last about 20 hours. Rechargeable batteries of that day lasted about half as long.
Someone developed a reading program for it called Vertical Reader. It read plain text files and scrolled them. No paging. It was called Vertical reader because you held the device sideways to read, so that it kind of resembled a book, since it folded, kind of like today's laptops except far smaller and thinner.
After that I began reading on one of the early Palm Pilots and over the years I kept getting more sophisticated Palms, finally getting a Palm Tungsten E2.
Palms had a 3" square screen which seemed at the time to be ideal for reading although now I'm spoiled by my Kindle and my phone. I haven't used a Palm in years and I doubt I'd enjoy it now. The screens on the earlier ones were 160x160 pixels. The E2 was 320x320 pixels although the screen was the same size. It made a big difference. The more expensive Tungstens had longer screens but the same width.
The real problem with Palms was their limited storage. It was only capable of using a 1 gig SD card. I forget how much built in storage there was but it wasn't much. I think it might have been 32 meg.
Apps in those days were a lot smaller, of course so that wasn't a huge problem. But you couldn't have many books on board.
Barry
Barry
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