Just before I turned ten years old, the original Star Trek television series made its debut. As a kid, I was fascinated by the technology being portrayed, and although I knew it was fiction, I also realized that some of what I saw might actually come to pass.

I didn't expect to see warp drives or transporters in my lifetime, but what about all those devices the characters carried around with them when they traveled to other planets? After all, the communicators the Star Trek crew used didn't seem much different from walkie-talkies (except that they were smaller and seemed to have a range of millions of miles). Today, we walk down the streets of any city and think nothing of the fact that people pull out their personal communicators and talk to anyone on the planet. We call them "cell phones."

There was another device the Star Trek crew often took with them: tricorders. In the original series, they were the size of 1970-model portable cassette recorders, requiring a strap to carry it on the shoulder. In later series, they were small enough to fold up and attach to a belt or place in a pocket. Obviously, they were small computers, with the ability to make audiovisual recordings and to display information on a small screen. Tricorders have come to life today as handheld computers, also called "palmtops" or PDAs (personal digital assistants).

The first significant PDA was introduced by Apple Computers back in 1993 and was known as the Newton, although as early as 1984, a British company had a PDA-like device called the Psion Organizer. Today, the PDA market is dominated by Palm Computing, almost to the point where we use the term "PalmPilot" to refer to any PDA we see. One important competitor is Handspring, which markets the Visor (it uses the same software as the Palm series).

What can you use a PDA for? With a very small screen and lacking a typical keyboard, a PDA is not ideally suited for the same tasks you might use a laptop (also known as a notebook) computer for. However, it can easily store addresses, phone numbers, appointments, and a to-do list. For a genealogist, it could be used to jot notes in a library, courthouse, archive, or cemetery, or to provide an electronic checklist of surnames to research or sources to examine. With a modem and access to a standard phone jack, it could also be used to read e-mail, although the ability to compose and send e-mail would usually require attaching an optional collapsible keyboard to the PDA. PDAs can also communicate with desktop computers in order to transfer information back and forth.

The next step in PDA technology is the addition of wireless communication. Think of it as combining the existing PDA with a cell phone. This means that it will be possible to use e-mail communication and Web browsing without the need to hook the PDA to a regular phone jack. Being able to effectively use the Web on small devices such as cell phones, pagers, and PDAs requires a new communication standard, known as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). A Web browser that runs on a small computing device is known as a "microbrowser." As you might imagine, a Web site that can be used by a PDA or other WAP device will need to present information that can be communicated over a slower connection and that can be displayed on a very small screen.

Genealogists will eventually be able to use WAP devices to access online genealogical databases via the Web. Imagine being able to visit a cemetery, obtain information from tombstones, and then instantly compare that information to other information already located on the Web. This isn't just science fiction anymore!

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column. He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.