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-...