The visionary behind the PDA revolution is Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the Palm Pilot back in 1996.
Today, a scant five years later, he is regarded with almost the same awe as Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who created the desktop revolution, and Microsoft's Bill Gates, whose fortune is based on the belief that a computer should be on every desk.
Mr. Hawkins first agreed with, and then contradicted, those giants.
Like Apple and Microsoft, he believed that everyone should have a computer, he told Globetechnology.com. But "then I looked at the desktop PC and said there's no way everyone is gonna have one of those."
The desktop PC is, in short, too big. Enter his obsession with small computers.
He had a couple of flops before the Palm Pilot took flight. The DOS-based GRiDPad, created when he was working for a laptop manufacturer called GRiD, died not long after it was introduced in 1989. In 1993 he created the Zoomer, a word derived from "consumer," with partners Tandy, GeoWorks and Casio; it was a failure just like the Apple Newton, also released in 1993, which burned through its half-billion-dollar budget with no discernable effect on the market.
Undeterred, he struck out on his own to create something even smaller - the Palm Pilot, which he released in 1996.
It's critical to understand that Mr. Hawkins arrived at his obsession with small things from a direction other than engineering or marketing: He has an avocation as a student of brain function and computational science. Early in his career, his passion for this subject led him to another contradiction, this time to a California computer company that was selling a pattern-recognition program for $1-million a pop.
"I said hey, I can do that for a lot less," he recalled. "Then I said hey, I can put it into a really small computer."
That ultimately led to Graffiti, the handwriting-recognition feature now installed in all Palm computers.
Today, Mr. Hawkins runs another company, Handspring, maker of the Visor PDA, which licences the Palm operating system he had created and sold to 3Com, and which 3Com subsequently spun off to become Palm Inc. He continues to be a maverick, sticking with his belief that most other PDA makers are on the wrong track.
Visor is going in the right direction, he said, because of its expansion slot, which runs on a proprietary system called Springboard. Handspring designed the system as a hardware add-on so Visor users could plug in bar-code readers, radios and telephones.
Most other PDA manufacturers have imitated Handspring's lead, Mr. said, but in his opinion they're not doing it right.
"Both Palm and Microsoft missed the point," he said. "Their expansion slots are primarily designed for memory. Palm has gone with the Secure Digital standard, Sony has its Memory Stick and Microsoft has gone with Compact Flash.
"There are five or six expansion strategies. They claim they can do a lot of things, but they're not really designed to do them."
Despite Mr. Hawkins' visionary reputation, he avoids peering into the future of the PDA. But he does know that it will involve networking.
"The whole thing's gonna be a bit of a mess for a few years," he said. "Each part of the world is different, and trying to produce a global standard will be very difficult.
"But in the future, everyone will carry around a tiny computer-telephone-radio and the connection will be very fast and virtually free."
Why will it be free?
"It's inevitable," he said. "After the cost of a cellphone network - the infractrusture, the tower, the licences - once all that's installed, the incremental cost of running the network will be almost zero. At some point in time, as the infrastructure becomes amortized, prices will become very inexpensive.
"It will be like having a T1 line in your pocket," he predicts.