The Tiqit eightythree is a handheld computer running standard desktop PC software. At 20 oz. it is easily the lightest such device to date to combine a built-in SMS keyboard and Cardbus PCMCIA slot with a large battery lasting upwards of four hours under continuous heavy use with its 640x480 TFT display at full brightness. The eightythree supports standard notebook connectivity (USB, IrDA, Stereo in/out, RS-232, and a full-featured docking connector) as well as a Secure Digital slot. Internally it features a 256 MB memory, a 10 GB hard drive, and a 300 MHz Geode CPU. The eightythree is Tiqit's response to the limited choices available today to enterprises seeking a practical and low-total-cost handheld solution whose software does not turn it into an expensive part of the problem. We will describe the eightythree and its underlying design decisions, discuss recent developments in this sparsely populated area of high-end handheld computing, and share our expectations of where the eightythree will be particularly valuable in that area.
About the speakers:
Henry Berg, President of Tiqit, served as an officer in the US Navy and flew E-2C Hawkeye radar planes deployed from aircraft carriers. He received his BS in electrical engineering from Yale and his MS in computer science from Stanford, where he is currently a PhD candidate in computer science (on leave).
Ian Blasch, CEO of Tiqit, spent four years in product development in the US Air Force, leading a skunkworks engineering team for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and a half-billion dollar engine maintenance program. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from MIT and holds MBA and MSE degrees from Stanford University and an MSME from Cranfield University (Marshall Scholar).
Vaughan Pratt is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University recalled to active duty and Chairman of Tiqit Computers. He obtained his PhD from Stanford under Don Knuth. He taught at MIT from 1972 to 1980, working in natural language, algorithms, complexity theory, and logics of programs. He helped found and was president of Research and Consulting Inc., a consortium of MIT faculty. In 1980 he joined Stanford's Sun workstation project, subsequently managing it until the formation of Sun Microsystems in 1982, where he designed the Sun logo and the Pixrect graphics system. His present research program at Stanford explores mobile computing, wavelet-based speech processing, time-domain EM propagation, and concurrency theory with a research group of several Ph.D. students and research associates.
Contact information:
Tiqit Computers
Web: http://www.tiqit.com
Email: eightythree@tiqit.com