Franklin Rex

[hunterjwizzard]

Anyone else ever heard of these things?

I'm very excited. I had one when they were only mostly obsolete, and today I discovered mine survived 20 years or tech purges fully intact! I have the card in protective case, docking station, and even the original box and documentation. I'll post pictures later, but I'm curious if this is something others are interested in.

 

[granzeier]

I remember those, but I always thought that they were too small (afraid that I would break it.)

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Here we go, found my camera(also somewhat vintage) and got a picture of it:

I put an i386 CPU in the frame for scale. Its the size of a PCMCIA card, which I think was actually a pretty neat concept. Instead of trying to use those dodgy IR links, you had a serial docking station for home, then on the go it just went in your computer's PCMCIA slot!

Anyway. I don't own a windows 95/98 era laptop right now, so when I get time it will be using the serial dock. The docking station takes batteries and it looks like when I mothballed this thing 20 odd years ago I forgot to take them out. Luckily, it turns out I've had 2 docks for it this whole time! I found a second one new-in-box in that box I've been saving as well.

This should be a fun project assuming I happen to have the software still...

 

[granzeier]

Yep, sounds fun all right. Keep us posted.

 

[oktology]

Always wanted one of those, could never justify buying one.

 

[NeXT]

When the StarTAC was still usable I used the clip-on organizer accessory for a few months and that was essentially the REX in a different package. I was so used to the Palm interface at that point I did find it very annoying how data entry worked and that to really take advantage of it you needed to sync it to your PC regularly.