But whose birthday is it?
 
It's ours, of course!

Ten years ago today, Acorn Arcade officially opened to the public, as this handily-archived newsgroup posting shows. With Alasdair Bailey and Graham Crockford at the helm the site soon increased in popularity enough to warrant moving to its own domain name, acornarcade.com, and eventually to its own dedicated server, owned by our benevolent dictator Rich Goodwin. A few years later Acorn Arcade gave birth to The Icon Bar, which then in an ironic turn of events absorbed the content of Acorn Arcade in late 2006, in order to give both sites a much-needed overhaul.
 
But what does all this mean?

A guilty secret: limited though they were, I used to love working with early Palm and Psion PDAs. Neal Stephonson wrote in his novel Cryptonomicon:

Eb is doodling on one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb [...] wrote the software for this model and so he has a lot of them lying around.

...which stuck in my head as it described my situation at the time. Apart from the bit where Eb is an über-hacker and I was a junior Perl mangler, obviously. Screen-wise the Palm V was just low-res black on a sort of olive green, and getting data on to them usually required a precariously-balanced IR-capable mobile phone and a lot of patience (or the foresight to sync everything before leaving home), but a small, omni-present device that responded to the touch always seemed so much more satisfying than the mouse or the glidepoint.
 
Fast forward a few years, and along comes the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet: a small device with a touchscreen, but updated for the 21^st century with wifi Internet access, a widescreen, full colour display, a proper Web browser and bluetooth connectivity. I'd looked at the proliferation of Windows-based PDAs over the years and they'd never appealed. Where the Palm and Psion devices felt like they'd been designed from the start with mobile computing in mind, WinCE always seemed like a big OS shoehorned into a little device, and wifi an afterthought if available at all. And don't get me started on small keyboards after the disaster that was the Psion Revo. Maybe this Linux-based device could put the fun back in to computing?