Sharp Wizard

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Opened OZ-7000 with an expansion card installed
Opened OZ-7000 with an expansion card installed

The first Sharp Wizard electronic organizer was the OZ-7000 released in 1988, making it one of the first electronic organizers (PDAs). 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 40 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 PCMCIA 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. Later Wizard organizers were smaller, dispensing with the expansion slot and soon bore little resemblance to the original OZ-7000.

Opened Sharp Electronic Organizer (sold as Sharp Wizard in the US) model QZ-770.
Opened Sharp Electronic Organizer (sold as Sharp Wizard in the US) model QZ-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) or QZ (rest of the world) followed by a number, for instance QZ-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 don't even calculate tips correctly.

Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.