Towards the end of last September, I received an e-mail message from Hal Goldstein, suggesting that I write an article on how the HP Palmtop is used in Japan, including a description of the hardware and software that has been developed here for the Palmtop. It seemed a good idea to me. A lot of very interesting hardware and software has been developed for the Palmtop here in Japan, and very little has been reported about it.
I talked about this idea with NORI, the Sysop (Forum moderator) of NIFTY-Serve's FHPPC forum (the Japanese equivalent of CompuServe's HPHAND Forum). NORI, one of the pioneers of the Japanese Palmtop community, reacted fast. He set up a PATIO (a kind of private forum in NIFTY-Serve) for the discussion about this project, invited authors to write different parts of the article, and wrote a part of the article himself.
Hiroyuki Sekiya coordinated the whole plan and wrote the software part of the article. MARIS and Makoto Niwa picked up the hardware and PC Card parts and contributed informative articles. Many other people contributed to the project by reading the articles and submitting corrections or additions. All of the separate parts of this article were originally written in Japanese and translated into English by me. I only hope that the factual, clear and rich language of the original documents was not lost in my translation.