For I/O, EIA RS-232-C dates from 1969 (original RS-232 was from 1960). With a BT RS-232 adapter, and osso-xterm (flying keyboard edition), you could play "I'm-a-terminal" with the N800. Of course, you could use a tape punch/reader for storage in contemporary-machine-readable form. The N800 (perhaps with a custom kernel for the RS-232 adapter?), could definitely hold its own. N810's keyboard could also be nice for the terminal thing.
And you think the camera on the N8x0 is crap; they'll think it's the sweetest video camera interfaced to a computer they've ever seen. (You'll both be right!)
Oh, and don't forget, your N8x0 can blast audio, even multiple frequencies simultaneously. You know what that means... software blue- and red-boxes should be easily constructable. Hey Bell

Karel, thanks for this whimsical post. The thought of using my N800 instead of the punch card stack I had for my final project (a 'star trek' game) in data processing (what they called it) class in HS ('74) made me LOL!

Me: I'd go back and avoid dropping that stack o cards on that fateful day and, instead of having to re-do my project, I'd make the A by simply playing Asteroids on my N800 for the teach!

It would be magic indeed! BTW the quote from A.C Clarke reminds me that it was in one of his short stories that I first got a 'glimpse' of the N8xx! Now I have one! Amazing!

Just a terminal? The N800 may be small... but size doesn't count.

You could have the N800 do all of the computing normally done by an entire time-sharing mainframe from that era... all while you watch Star Wars. (And you would have tons of storage left over to spare... so you could probably do all of the work of many mainframes if you did batches.)

EDIT: Sorry: we don't need no stinking batches.

EDIT2: Make that The Lord of the Rings. The geeks from that era would like both... but LOTR would probably be more awesome to them.

The N800 has a built-in FM radio too, that would fit right in in 1978 (and earlier). In 1979 I bought my first battery-only LCD clock radio.. it looks quite like a just slightly larger N800, just without the LCD screen. So it could hide like that for a while..

And Karel said 'going back to 1978'.. that's perfect, because the first experimental GPS satellite was launched in 1978. I don't know if it transmitted anything on the civilian band yet though. But in the early eighties more satellites were launched, and where I worked at the time there would regularly arrive engineers with huge racks of equipment to test the GPS system, this was long before it became operational. If they did transmit anything on the civilian band back then then I imagine those engineers would be quite shocked to see my BT GPS used with my N800!

Gad - all this talk about the late '70' as if it was ancient history.
We were running full blown Apple II's at my lab doing line of sight plots. It just took longer.
Now back around 1970 when I was processing computer chips at IBM Burlington a Nokia N810 would have been a big hit. I still remember when we celebrated getting three transistors on a chip with good yield.
And what would I take - a good power source and some form of usb to RS232 would be essential.

I cut my IT teeth on things like an IBM 1401 and paper tape.. Tape was a pain in the butt, it was NOT fast , and was useless for transfer of large volumes of data. It was a good way to input data from teletype systems, though. High speed was considered to be around 24 to 30 inches of tape per second (which is between 240-300 characters per second). It was a real pain to handle , as you really needed to avoid tears, folds, and bends.
Punch cards and Unit Record stufff were even more fun. Chad made a great prank material, and you haven't lived unitl you were on the next to last pass of a multipass, multitray card sort on a high speed sorted, only to hear the dread sound of cards being shredded by the sorter, as a slight edge fold got hung up..
I can also remember the day when the company photographer was there to phtograph our "new" tape drives.. We poor operator types warned him, but the data centre manager told him to shoot. The flash triggered the EOT and rewind sensors, throwing drives from forward into fast stop/rewind, in the middle of production runs. (the old IBM drives used a reflective tape spot to mark the end of tape. The drive had a light beam and photocell that detected this)..
Or the joys of IBM 1403 line printers when the carriage control tape snapped, and ran away, spewing paper everywhere?
Ah the good old days..

Cheers
Harold

Interesting and timely (excuse the pun) thread, seeing as this week at work we have turned up an original IBM AT with IBM color monitor, and several Psion Organiser II's. Both very interesting bits of kit to power up and see what it was like back in the mid 80's.

Like a lot of folk on here I'm sure, I remember the early days. I started with a sinclair zx81, and progressed though various incarnations of desktops and psion handhelds. What we can do now would have absolutely stunned people 25 years ago.

The internet tablet is almost exactly what I was willing the psions to be 7 years ago, and what was being hinted at by some companies, remember the zenith cruisepad or the 3com audrey anyone?

Wow. Is this thread still around?

My first "home" computer was an Altair 8800.
As far as PDAS, I started out with a Newton OMP, and have owned every Newt released since that one..
My N800 should be arriving next week, and from what I have seen of them, this is what I would have loved to have seen the Newton eveolve towards. My son has an Ipod Touch, and while its a cute toy, hadling and playing with it pushed me over the edge to the N800. Getting an N800 in Canada turned out to be interesting, but doable. I'll let you know what my impressions are once it lands..
As far as Unix?, well, I'm an AIX bigot, mainly, and I still have a few SCO client and server licences kicking around.. I did once manage to get KDE running on SCO...(why? I dunno, seemed like fun at the time)
Cheers
Harold