Sharp Wizard

Opened OZ-7000 with an expansion card installed

The Sharp Wizard is a series of electronic organizers released by Sharp Corporation. The first model was the OZ-7000 released in 1989, making it one of the first electronic organizers to be sold.

The OZ-7000 was about 6.1 inches (155 mm) tall, 3.5 inches (90 mm) wide closed, 7.25 inches (184 mm) open, and 0.75 inches (19 mm) thick closed, making it much larger than current PDAs. It featured a connection port to attach to a Windows PC or Macintosh, an optional thermal printer and cassette tape backup, 32 kilobytes of memory, an 8 by 16 character black and white LCD, and an expansion slot for accessory cards.

The functionality of the OZ-7000 included a memo pad, a telephone pad, calendar and scheduling with alarms and repeating events, multi-time zone clocks, and a calculator. All the basics found in PDAs since. The keyboard was not QWERTY, although later models changed the orientation of the screen and keyboard to allow that.

The expansion cards were about the same size and shape of PC Cards but predated that standard and were incompatible. The slot was behind touch sensitive plastic allowing for up to twenty "buttons" on the card. The original selection of cards included memory expansion cards, a thesaurus dictionary, and some games.

The OZ-8000 followed, with a larger screen and more memory, and opened in landscape rather than portrait orientation. The OZ-9600 and OZ-9600II were the last of in this family of PDA in the wizard line. Later Wizard organizers were smaller, dispensing with the expansion slot and soon bore little resemblance to the original OZ-7000.

The OZ-9600II has 512kb of memory, and a clamshell design. It included the card slot, and optional accessory fax/modem. It bears a resemblance to the initial Zaurus line which continued this PDA family for Sharp.

Opened Sharp Electronic Organizer (sold as Sharp Wizard in the US) model ZQ-770.

The later Sharp Wizards were something between an electronic databank and a PDA. They were small, lightweight devices with keyboards but no touch screen running on a Zilog Z80.

The model numbers start with either OZ (for the USA, a prefix that's meant to be a pun on The Wizard of Oz) or ZQ (rest of the world) followed by a number, for instance ZQ-770 is a non-US organizer with 3 MB memory.

The organizer was spoofed in the Seinfeld episode "The Wizard" when Jerry Seinfeld gave one to his father, Morty, who perceived its only function to be a "tip calculator". Morty tried to give organizers to board members of his condo association as gifts, because he believed Jerry had gotten one at a discount price. Jerry was only able to get them cheaply from Bob Sacamano's father and they turned out to be low quality imitation Wizards, "Willards", which did not calculate tips correctly.


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 6/21/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.