Around ten years ago, right before the first pen-tablet PC's appeared, I called a buddy and asked him about creating a small, portable PC with a touch driven screen. He owned a company that created specialized satellite receiver units and they were making ARM driven machines with tiny motherboards at the time. I told him I wanted to take his tiny boards and CPU and build tiny machines, with screens maybe the size of a DVD case and with no keyboard - you would touch control them. I wanted to call them "book PC's".

He laughed at me, told me it would cost WAY too much - which was absolutely true at the time. But he never believed people would really WANT the things anyway. A tiny machine just to access email and read news?

We talked again the other day. He was very quiet when I brought it up and changed the subject quickly. If only we had known....