The phone dialer on Page 2 item #12 is absolutely ridiculous. It sounds completely rational to setup a Game Boy and Work Boy to dial a phone number. I sure do hate it when phones don't come with numbers to dial out. ...It makes me want one of these even more. @WolverineDK "Schadenfreude" just doesn't translate well out of German. Ever watch someone fall down and then laugh, even though you know you shouldn't? That is Schadenfreude.
It translates very well from German, if I may correct you. We Swedes speak of "skadeglädje" on a daily basis.
"Hello? Yea its me. No, I can hear you just fine. Can you hear me now? Maybe its 'cuz im dialin' out on the old gameboy...heh."
we call it skadefryd, so it is not the meaning of the word. I am wondering about, since fryd means glæde/joy too in Danish. SO Schadenfreude is translated quite well in Danish too.
Keep in mind that this was probably back before most phones had "address books". The point of a dialer would be to store the tones for your most frequently used calls. It's the equivalent of just dialing "4" to call home or whatever, except with another piece of equipment to use. I actually have a hand-held tone dialer from Radio Shack, which they sold as late as 2003, and for all I know they still do. Of course I've never seen anyone actually use one because it's still a somewhat silly concept :lol: Incidentally, Work Boy reminds me of some of InfoGenius's Gameboy productivity "games" like Personal Organizer. I'll have to check and see how similar they really are.
I love old Game Boy stuff, but the screen is so small! Can't imagine using it for text-heavy tasks. Has anyone here owned one of these? I would imagine it would hurt your eyes after a while. (unrelated: schadenfreude...)
I remember reading that exact article whilst stood in W H Smith all those years ago. I'm sure Mum wouldn't buy me the magazine either (I was 12 in '92). I did wonder what happened to the device and if it ever did come out. It could have been quite a nifty little gadget. Thanks for sharing the scans.
That made me chuckle a little inside. While this is pretty cool, I don't want one particularly. I'm a Nintendo 64 man to the bone. I tell you what. If I find one, I'll sell it to one of you guys. Aren't I nice? Cheers, Franklint
At the time it didn't really have much competition, a couple of heavy laptops, things like the Tandy 100 and Sharp / Casio PDAs and computers. Pound for Pound the Work boy with some decent software could have been quite a nice unit as it stood it was too expensive and nothing a cheaper and smaller unit couldn't have done. The phone dailer is useful if you are at a phone box and you instead of tapping the number in, you simplely find the number you want, hold the unit next to the mouthpiece and press a button and it dails the number for you. Mobile phones were still bricks and expensive at the time. I remember my first mobile phone, was small enough for a jacket pocket but was heavy and didn't do much apart from call numbers and store a few numbers.
Nothing so complicated. And no pc link. The keyboard connected to the gameboy, and the cartridge with it had a calculator, an address book, and I think that was about it. (I was the programmer but it was a long time ago now, don't remember it doing much else. Certainly no BASIC interpreter.) It got canned because the gameboy price dropped just before it was going to go on the market, and it was decided they couldn't sell it for more than the cost of a gameboy.
A calculator and address book seems pointless for a aquarious like keyboard add on and even around 1992 a half decent databank that would store names and address, phone numbers, calculate, tell the time and have an alarm would have been about 20 quid and unlike the Work Boy would have fitted into a large wallet, let alone a pocket.
