  PDA’s The Luddite has never had a PDA. Ever. PDA stands for, as I am sure you must know by now, Personal Digital Assistant.
They used to be a little smaller than a brick. They have gotten smaller now. Their job was to hold phone numbers and little notes for retrieval later. Apple Computers developed it during the reign of the now-hated John Scully in the early 80s. I say this to point out that PDAs aren’t exactly new.
The first time I ever ran into a PDA was in the form of the Newton in the 80s. Remember those things? Newton’s were infamous for screwing up anything you wrote on them, sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results. They were resuscitated in the late 90s in the form of the Palm Pilot. In order to write on one of these things, all you had to do was learn the shorthand that was included in a sticker under the lid. But that wasn’t the allure of the Palm Pilot. The allure was in the fact that it could accept information and phone numbers from OTHER Palm Pilots.
Even though The Luddite missed out on this sort of thing, he could imagine high-class folk in bars ‘beaming’ their phone numbers to people they found attractive across the room, especially after a few martinis. The Luddite is perfectly aware that the words ‘Palm Pilot’ refer to a specific product made by a company and that he should use the more generic ‘PDA,’ which he will.
However, The Luddite does not have too much sympathy for this position as companies spend billions trying to associate their product with a certain function, like ‘kleenex.’ So they have to take any bad that comes their way along with the good. New PDA’s also collect and play music and function as tape recorders. People used to walk around with little tape recorders up to their mouths, recording their thoughts—now they can do the same with PDAs—as if this guarantees we want to listen to them. Folks who can afford these things have to face one depressing fact—just because they made a lot of money doesn’t mean the thoughts they put down on tape are profound.
A lot of the time they are the auditory equivalent of wheatgrass juice. The big selling point I noticed of the PDA’s is that ‘if you lose that number on a piece of scratch paper, it’s gone.’ This summons inside me a great big feeling of ‘so what?’ Buying something that is going to cost me at least $69—which is the cheapest PDA I found on the web--is going to teach me to be less careless?
Maybe I travel in the wrong circles or maybe it’s the kind of thing you keep in it’s own little pouch, but I have never SEEN anyone with a PDA. This is something that just has to make the manufacturers sure happy. I see people with cel phones all the time, but I have never seen anyone with a PDA. I’m sure people have them, but I never SEE any. There must be some message here, but I don’t know what it might be.
As far as he is concerned, there is nothing a PDA does that cannot be done by a pen and a piece of scratch paper, which The Luddite is never without. It’s not as cool as a PDA, but The Luddite is past caring and figures that such a minimalist thing will be back in vogue soon. Plus, here’s is what The Luddite considers the clincher: The cost of The Luddite’s pen and scratch paper system is $4.99 or whatever a ream of paper that has already been through his printer once costs.
The pen is a giveaway that The Luddite picked up on an interview. That is at least an additional $64.01 The Luddite can spend on booze. Many PDA’s go for more than that. I rest my case. 
