The mobile device market was a true mess in the mid-1990s. Some talked about the smartphone concept, others staunchly defended the personal digital assistant, and then there were those who saw a sort of hybrid between the two as the solution.
Anyone thinking of the old digital assistants will automatically land in the territory of Palm devices, which dominated the market for years until smartphones devoured them. Today, Palm is owned by TCL, and from what we've seen there are no big plans to bring it back, but nostalgia for dedicated assistants sometimes gains strength, especially when we consider the “smartphone fatigue” that many users suffer.
Casio Secret Sender 6000
Now, if we travel a little further back, to the early 1990s to be precise, we find none other than Casio. Some of its organizers had a very formal profile, oriented toward the office and productivity... but there were also things like this:
The Casio Secret Sender 6000, a mix of calculator, organizer, instant messenger, calendar, and intimate diary. Essentially a continuation of the previous My Magic Diary model, it came equipped with a memory of 4,096 bytes, equivalent on average to about 70 entries in the organizer (the final number depended on the amount of characters used).
It also included as secondary functions a “fortune teller,” a “secret memory” to store confidential data, and a curious “Match Maker” mode that determined whether you were “compatible” with someone. However, the two crown jewels were sending and receiving messages to other Secret Sender devices via infrared, and the remote control function, with support for brands like Sony, Samsung, Philips, Panasonic, Toshiba, and more. The best part? It worked with televisions and VCRs.
The Casio Secret Sender 6000 needed two types of batteries, a pair of AAA as the main source, and a CR2032 coin as emergency backup. Why? For the simple fact that there was no direct method to back up the stored data. Battery performance was very good (240 hours of continuous use, and three years on backup), but if both ran out at the same time... poof! The only alternative Casio offered was buying a special cable and using it to transfer information to another compatible Casio organizer.
If you want to satisfy your retro hunger and buy one, you'll have to head to eBay (Magic Diary variants are easy to find), and if you already have a Secret Sender in your possession, we'd love to see some images.
