Part I

At first, there was Hawkins. They were three some time later, but Jeff Hawkins was alone at first. Having graduated from the Cornell University in 1979, the newly-baked electronics engineer went to work… Yes, like many other future founders of a company, which would say its word in the industry, Jeff went to work for Intel. He toiled in the research center in Oregon (D1C), then in Boston. Yet, he only stood Intel for three years. Jeff wanted to rock this world, and instead… “I wanted more responsibility. Intel said I needed more subordination.”

So, Jeff turned to a small start-up, established in the Silicon Valley and called GRiD Systems. The company was working on the design of the first portable computer. They didn’t think about pocket computers at that time – simple portability was enough. This was a revolutionary idea for those times as there were not even sub-notebooks then – the year 1982 was running outside. Since his university years, Jeff had a passion for exploring the human mind and wanted to make a step farther. That is, to make a computer directly communicating with the human brain. This was close to an obsession and he lastly followed his wife’s advice to enter the biophysics department in Berkeley.

Three years later Jeff realized he solved the mystery of the human mind. There was a problem, though. No one at Berkeley listened to him. So, in 1988 Hawkins left the university without achieving the longed-for doctor degree. It was unimportant. During his studies of neural networks, Jeff amassed enough research material on the human brain’s image recognition algorithms. Expanding this material further, he formulated an algorithm of image recognition that could be fed into the computer and had it patented. The algorithm was named PalmPrint.

Science was good, but he had to earn his living somewhere. Hawkins went back to GRiD Systems, but for a different role. Licensing his PalmPrint to the company, he became vice-president of research and started getting to the practical implementation of his idea. As for money, they had enough: at about that time GRiD was acquired by Tandy, an electronics manufacturer, which was once known for making one of the first personal computers. Overall, a year and a half after Hawkins’ return, GRiD unveiled one of the world’s first computers with pen input.

And in the meanwhile it was the beginning of a new era – the era of pocket computers. They had even acquired a generic name. John Sculley, Apple’s CEO at that time, christened them as Personal Digital Assistants – PDA (by the way, Apple was into pocket PCs since 1987 when Hawkins was still grinding the sciences at university). The matter was ripe and attracted furtive glances from such giants as IBM, Samsung and NEC.