Sharp Wizard OZ-7000

Sharp Wizard OZ-7000
Sharp Wizard OZ-7000, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: John S
Flash: Off
Film: Pistil

Cleaning up and packing my office prior to a move, discovered this old, old piece of equipment. Not sure why I keep it, but…

From Wikipedia;

The Sharp Wizard is a series of electronic organizers released by Sharp Corporation. The first model was the OZ-7000 released in 1988, making it one of the first electronic organizers to hit the market.
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, a 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 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 Jerry supposedly had gotten one at a discount price. Jerry can only get them from Bob Sacamano’s father and they turn out to be low quality imitation Wizards, “Willards”, which do not calculate tips correctly.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Wizard

1 thought on “Sharp Wizard OZ-7000

  1. Gerry Verhaage says:

    Being an electronic tech I am still amazed at the new electronics that come out each year.

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