Sharp Wizard
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The first Sharp Wizard electronic organizer was the OZ-7000 released in 1988, making it one of the first Personal digital assistants (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 kilobytes 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 PCMCIA 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 screens 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) or QZ (rest of the world) followed by a number, for instance QZ-770 is a non-US organizer with 3 MB memory.
[edit] Trivia
- The organizer was spoofed in the Seinfeld episode The Wizard when Jerry gave one to his father, Morty, who perceived its only function as to be a "tip calculator." Morty needed to bribe board members of his condo association, and orders them through Bob Sacamano's father to distribute as gifts. They turn out to be low quality imitation Wizards—"Willards"—which don't even calculate tips correctly.
