Mobile Coding 1980 thru 2025

I was fortunate to have been introduced to the power of computing using the delightful device on the left before being introduced to the dreadful device on the right. The device on the left instilled a deep desire to compute on the go while the device on the right triggered stress at having to schedule time in a lab, getting to the lab on schedule to sit at a clunky machine to create it so that it could be carefully managed (not dropped) with a stack of others like it to feed into another machine which would read them all in the order stacked to be converted into a form a mainframe could execute. I knew mobile was the future for me.

The HP-41C cost $250 when I got it. Fifteen years later I spent about $2K for my first laptop.

I waited until the iPad 2 was released to get my first tablet. At $500 it was a cool tool, but I couldn't code on it. Well, I could, but the code was compiled and executed remotely via the WWW.

Today, mobile computing is gaining some ground again. At $2K, the iPad Pro 13 M5 with keyboard is getting there. This tool using the Swift Playgrounds IDE to perform lightweight development is a useful idea-coding toolset, but a Mac running Xcode leveraged with AI to do the bulk of tedious coding is still needed.

I had expected by now that I would be able to dock my smartphone to a couple of large LCD displays, a keyboard and mouse to use as my coding platform. Maybe someday before I die.