The Ripley wearable computer project was born in 1999 with the purpose of allowing us to liberate ourselves from the desktop computer. Existing computing devices, such as laptop computers and PDAs, were unsatisfactory.
Laptops are just small desktop computers with the same modality of use.
PDAs, on the other hand, were simply not robust enough to handle most of the situations we envisioned. Sony InfoLithium camcorder batteries. HandyKey's Twiddler was used as the input device and a LiquidImage M1 was modified to wear comfortably with a baseball cap. A modified parallel port Color QuickCam was attached to the baseball cap mounted M1 to capture images with a script called from the crontab. The images were copied to the Apache html directory for web surfers to see.