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Comment by hellbannedguy | Hacker News Reader

This brings back memories.

One--how much I liked my TX. (One of the first little devises you could get on the internet with. I was a Goodguy's Liquidation sale. They had 500 Halo 2 Collector's editions for $5.00/piece. I needed the price on ebay. Everyone had a dumb phone. I went to a closed public library, and logged on with no password. I saw a high of 50 bucks. Went back and bought them all. I thought I had a upper hand in pricing stuff at auctions, etc. A year later, and it seemed like everyone had a smart phone.

two--dissapointment over how this company was mismanaged to the ground.

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The palm hand writing system was amazing. Instead of trying to teach the computer to recognize everyone's handwriting, people - the users, adapted by learning a few very simple rules, to write notes. It took about 3 minutes to learn. After 5 minutes of use, you could take down written notes, almost as fast as on paper - which were digitised. You could do it without looking at the screen. (20 years later old Palm users still have a few weird handwriting quirks.)

Just FYI, it lives on, and there's an android keyboard app that implements it! mostly useful if you have a device with stylus, of course: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...

> mostly useful if you have a device with stylus

I have been using graffiti since I use Android, and I use it with fingers more frequently than with a stylus: no problem. You do not need the stylus.

(But I use a modified application with the option to set the graffiti area height - that may be an enabler on some systems.)

You don't need a stylus. I've been using this app since I got a smart phone and only have a stylus if I am sitting at my desk. It's much quicker -- for me -- than the keyboard.

With Android 11, I've noticed that sometimes it "locks" up and I need to switch to the Samsung keyboard for a couple of characters and then switch back. (This could be a Samsung issue, as I never had a problem with my Sony phones.)

My AST Gridpad (aka Tandy Zoomer) had Graffiti. To this day I still have the strokes in muscle memory.

> two--dissapointment over how this company was mismanaged to the ground.

pardon the pun, but they had the mobile market in the palm of their hand. They could have exploded as a smartphone provider had they evolved. Instead they faded to nothing. So frustrating.

They did a superb job with Palm Pre/webOS, they did. Only they then gathered people to watch it live a painful death suffocating in Sprint exclusivity. It was like having delivered regular updates about a random person with terminal cancer. To this day I still don't understand why the public had to watch graphic death scenes of Palm and RIM each going down.

My observation was that sprint hampered our growth (maybe) but chasing Verizon killed us. It was a terribly negotiated deal. Verizon kept upping the purchase order and forcing us to have the inventory on hand only for the demand to never materialize. This caused the liquidity crunch and eventual sale to HP. At least, that’s my understanding of the story but I was a low IC new grad at that point.

"This brings back memories."

Yeah I can remember seeing this yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-09-09

I had a Palm Treo that I used to use for looking up things at yard sales on eBay, hoping to find things to flip for huge gains.

Damn thing only lasted for about two hours of eBay use so I couldn't even make it through a full morning of garage sales.

> this company was mismanaged to the ground.

You've said that twice on this thread. I honestly don't remember; is there a story somewhere? Wasn't there another company (Treo) also building hardware with Palm OS?

>Wasn't there another company (Treo) also building hardware with Palm OS?

Handspring (later bought by Palm) and Sony were the most notable third-party vendors, although there were many others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices

Internet or the web?

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