A History of Palm, Part 1: Before the PalmPilot

I was thrilled by my purchase of an original Palm Pilot during my last year of high school and delighted in filling its Notes application with a wealth of data which would now be in my "palm." I would go on to develop a few applications that ran on later devices such as the Palm III and Palm V. To this day, I recall with fondness poring over Palm's documentation and the book by Neil Rhodes and Julie McKeehan [1] and writing code using the MetroWorks CodeWarrior for Palm OS [2].

Having primarily used Windows and early Linux distributions at the time, Palm's elegant and useful user interface guidelines were my introduction to user experience and eventually led me to Mac OS.

While I fought the Palm OS storage model at the time, in retrospect, it was, like the UI approach, also an elegant abstraction that played a key role in safeguarding the performance expectations of the user experience.

[1] https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/palm-os-progr...

[2] http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/4762/metrowerks-releases-...

I worked at a law firm from 1997 to 2001. I was a person who liked gizmos and wrote programs for them as a programmer analyst. Whenever someone got a Gizmo like a Royal PDA with Datalink abilities to sync with Outlook they sent me to help. I even bought a Timex Datalink watch. There was Windows CE devices, and PalmPilots too. I had worked on a web based docket calendar and some of these devices had a calendar that synced with Outlook.

Apple had the Newton but poor handwriting recognition. Palmpilots had something like shorthand, but also a pop-up keyboard or an external keyboard as well.

I remember working with the Davinci devices as well.

It is good to see the start of the market, before Palm.

The Timex Datalink was the original smart watch and they even had apps for it, but it didn't have much in the way of memory and synced with Outlook using a program that only worked in Windows 95 unless you had the notebook adapter.

GRiD's office in Mountain View used to be right across Garcia Ave from Sun Building 1, with big three dimensional sculptured letters of their logo in front. I wondered if that was where Sun got the idea of naming NeWS in the same lower-case-vowel style. According to Wikipedia: The lowercase "i" was a note of thanks to Intel for helping in the early days. [1]

Here's a fun Palm app called "PalmJoint" that I was beaming around and virtually toking with people at CodeCon. More of a pleasure card than a business card. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Systems_Corporation

[2] http://imgur.com/a/OjhQ4

I still use Tungsten T3 as improvised e-book reader. For long time there was nothing that combined the form-factor with the clarity of T3's display.

I have a few Palm devices scattered about. The PalmPilot Professional was my first one and widely recognised. One of my last as the Tungsten T3.

I got excited over webOS. Then it got bought by HP and killed. Sigh...

I still fantasize about the Palm Graffiti input method. I've tried Graffiti-like 3rd party keyboards and I just haven't clicked with any of the modern options.

I remember watching Palm founders Panel on Youtube few months ago, It was made in a format similar to computer history museum panels, but I cant find it now in their playlists :(. Anyone knows the link to the thing Im talking about? Im pretty sure I didnt imagine it.

I still miss using my Palm III. It did one thing and did it really well. I switched to the Android G1 from the (rather buggy) Treo 680 when the first Android phone came out. Sadly, I trusted my Palm III more with my contacts (and the backup synced on Palm Desktop and that backed up to external media) than I do Android what with Google+ integration wrecking the Gmail Address Book and resulting in frequent duplicated or lost contacts.

I bought the Palm 111, then the Palm TX. The Palm TX was great! It had internet access. That device made me an easy $15 grand in two months.

Now this was before smartphones were commonplace, and Goodguy's was going out of business. They had a huge section of video games. The wholesaler didn't know anything about video games, nor did I, but I knew they were worth more than $5 a game.

It was 9:30 at night, so I went to the outside of a local library. Got on the Internet, and found out people were buying Halo 3 Collector's edition for at least $30-$45.

I rushed back to Goodguy's and bought every box. They even threw in the displays.

The staff laughed at me. I remember thinking, I couldn't have pulled this off without that Palm TX. That TX gave me such a business advantage.

Two to three years later, everyone had a smartphone. My magic box was common place. I didn't have a commpetitative edge anymore.

Out of all business failures; the failure of Palm really bothered me then, and now. The Palms I had were rugged little products.

I connected the Palm to a gps, loaded the unit with Delorme maps, and took it down the Rogue River in a Baggie. The Rogue is a River in Oregon. I could see when Rainey falls, and Blossom Bar were about to hit us on that little black and white screen. Actually, with the zoom the screen size was more than enough. It worked beautifully.

A previous year I went over Rainey falls by accident. My best friend went over with me. He was 57 and a three pack a day smoker. He was under the water for a long time, but popped up, and swam to shore. The first words out of his mouth were, "Are my smokes wet?". Actually, his first works were yelling my name--then the smokes. Unfortunately, the smokes did survive. After that accident, by the fire at night. He told me, "I just had a hillbilly ECG!".

Years later, a doctor insisted he get a scan. His arteries were squeaky clean. He made it to 70 smoking--only quitting two months before he died. The last year he did need lung medication, and oxygen. Actually, he need albuteral for at least five years? A few weeks before he died, he told me he was lying about his smoking habit. He said he was smoking close to four-five packs a day since 14. I figured he had good genes, or maybe it was his diet? He barely ate.

Anyways, he died peacefully in his sleep ten years ago. I do miss the guy.

On a selfish note, don't make friends with people who are much older than you. Or, if you do--cultivate a lot of friends. He was basically my only friend. We did a lot of crazy stuff together. My life hasen't been the same since he passed away.

Sorry, got off subject.

(When he finally quit-- a few months before he passed, he said, "I thought it would be harder to quit? I actually believed all those commercials comparing smoking cigs to heroin." "I would have quit years ago if I knew what I know now.")