Bringing Palm OS devices back online – A journey into vintage computing (2019)
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medium.com
A few of the apps live on in emulation on my Android via StyleTap. One is the best astronomy map app I've ever used, another a favorite game (from back before platforms like Google turned us into product and incentivized developers to fill their stores with so much low-quality ad-infested in-app-purchase garbage).
I held onto a few models over the years which I kept as backup devices (eg. Palm V, Treo, an Enfora Wifi sled) and local copies of all the software to make 'em work. Quite confident I could bring them back to life for posterity (though secretly wish I could bring them back to life as a daily driver).
Like you say, if I'm writing longhand with a good pen, I wouldn't write this way; but it definitely shaped my writing. Also, I learned cursive in 1st grade. I got my first Palm Pilot in 6th grade. It peeled back a lot of my writing style...
Really the amount of time I spend trying to just stop Android from using the wrong autocomplete words is less than what it took to jot letters out on the Palm...
Once I also built a proto-Grafitti symbol recognizer with a neural network in Python. (It doesn't support the Graffiti "X" because it requires two strokes).
I had forgotten about the lawsuit.
The issue for me was that, by the time that was muddying the water, I had moved on to a keyboard-based Treo 650 that I used off and on with sidelines in BlackBerry (about which UGH) and WinMo (UGH UGH UGH) -- until I got my first iPhone.
The Treo keyboard was good enough I didn't miss stylus input, but on the WinMo device I absolutely did. BB was its own thing, but didn't really work for me on any level.
I'm probably faster on my iPhone than I was with Graffiti, but both input mechanisms enabled fast-enough input that I was rarely frustrated at the input rate.
The fact that it's been shoehorned down to an OS for TVs is a bit of sting. I'm glad to see that it's still around, but I can't help but wonder what the landscape would be like if they executed better.
As the article says, the web browser was limited but it was good enough for an internet search if you wanted to settle an argument in the pub.
It also coincided with me wandering around with bulging pockets: palm V, Nokia, an MP3 player and a wallet.
Got all of it now in an old Samsung Galaxy S8, but the infra red internet setup was pretty eye opening for people who had seen nothing like that before.
You can't have a proper pub argument any more, the mobile internet kinda killed the fun of being knowledgeable without relying on an ever present search engine.
Despite the lack of success that afternoon, I still remember that feeling of how significant a game changer these new fangled devices could be.
It was a cute device, I mostly used it to play sudoku on. I still have it somewhere I think, I wonder if I can turn it back on. Don't think I have the charging cradle anymore though.
I loaded up a bunch of games on my CLIÉ NX70v. Warning: The nostalgia hits hard.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/User:Jeffmikels/Bluetooth_P...
Once I learned this, I just did all of my Hotsyncing over the network.
And well, you still have IRC clients for Palm, they work great with Bitlbee.
Lots of people use Gopher under Palms, too. They are praised a lot on the Gopher universe.
And you can read HN and lots of sites such as CNN, Reddit, blogs... under Gopher.
The Palm Pre is much less troublesome in that regard - and WebOS is a pretty nice mobile OS too. I was very curious when I saw it running on a PinePhone.
I guess the relative unpopularity was given the fact that wifi or 4G wasn't ubiquitous, like it is nowadays. But oh boy did I love searching random little games for that thing and playing around with it.
And as others have mentioned, you could tether over cable or irda.
I used to check my email like that in the middle of nowhere when I was traveling in Australia.
Some less fortunate people had Windows CE PDAs. Bigger, heavier, clunkier battery eaters (well before rechargeables were ubiquitous).
And the batteries lasted for weeks.
I was initially a Newton user. The Newt, for all the snarky lines about its initial HWR, was a really great device, and the size made it (at least for me) a reasonable note-taking platform in meetings and whatnot. But it was big.
When I shifted to the Palm -- which was obviously much smaller, lighter, etc; I could slip it into an inside coat pocket -- I found I was taking notes on a laptop or on paper again. The size made it less appealing to me as a notetaking platform, even though it made it MORE appealing for many other tasks.
[1]https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002953903622.html?spm=a2...
An era that is completely gone; touchscreen phones have completely replaced the whole category.
Semantics aside, it was a fun read :)
Maybe my comment comes more from a place of “oh shit I’m old” rather than a strong objection to the authors comments…
However for consoles 2000 slices between machines of the same generation like the aforementioned Dreamcast (pre-2000) and Gamecube (post-2000). These are systems that shared groundbreaking titles between them like Phantasy Star Online; which was one of the very first online multiplayer games for consoles (and which I still play weekly guild matches, streamed on Twitch).
After that generation of consoles the specifications for consoles were all pretty similar to PC (chipsets aside): ethernet, wireless, HDMI (the previous generation were all pre-HD too), a HDD, etc. But it was the Dreamcast (and, released much later, the Xbox) in the generation of consoles before that really pioneered this shift in paradigm for console gaming and which many of the consoles of that era only had support for via addons (GC Ethernet Adapter, PS2 Network Adaptor, HDDs for the PS2 Expansion Bay, etc. Heck, even the GC didn't ship with ethernet instead having a dial up modem, and it wasn't even as fast as 56K in most regions!)
Thus I think they deserve to be retro for the same reason that 1996-2000 for PC gaming does: they defined how the next couple of decades of gaming would look while making plenty of mistakes along the way.
They definitely lost innovation. The only innovations in gamimg were bloat and greed. That's why is more entertaining to play older titles: they are all about play, they do not try to extort you or bring your PC to the limit.
Take Untitled Goose Game, for example. It was released 3 years ago and you play the part of a Goose who's mission it is to annoy as many people in a quaint English village as possible. The game is basically a modern day equivalent of the How to Be a Complete Bastard class of games from the Spectrum era of home systems. And it's fun too!
There's also no shortage of modern games released for older hardware. On the shelf behind me I have at least 5 games released in the last 5 years for various Sega consoles. The Gameboy and Gameboy Advance also see a surprising number of new releases each year too (though I don't collect for those consoles specifically).
I'm sure John Carmack still does amazing tricks at Oculus.
The Dreamcast had a built in modem and some models of PS2 had one built in.
Yeah that's what I meant (GC and DC too similar acronyms -- easy to typo). I did say elsewhere that the GC's online capabilities required an addon whereas the DC shipped with one).
That said, there were a few special edition Dreamcasts that shipped with the ethernet adapter instead of a modem. They weren't common but they did exist.
I've got a GC and DC sat next to me too -- unfortunately neither with an ethernet adapter. I do have a DreamPi hooked up on the DC though.
> there was only 4 games in its entire library that could even go online.
5 actually, though the 5th only went online for DLC. That said, you can argue that it's a bit of a stretch to call PSO and PSO+ different games.
It's also worth noting that there were a few other GC games that supported the ethernet addapter too albeit for LAN play rather than online. This was in addition to those games also supporting crossover cable.
> and some models of PS2 had one built in.
The original models didn't have it. It was only the slimline models that had ethernet and they were released quite late in the life of the PS2. The previous models required a hardware expansion adapter to provide online functionality (like the GC). Sony were pretty late to the game in that regard because Sega and Microsoft had already proven online gaming by that point.
I believe there was a modem adapter for the PS2 too, but I don't know much about that.
So depending on your definition of retro vs collector vs vintage...
* H W Bush meets with Yeltsin, Cold War officially declared over.
* The EU was officially formed.
* Ukraine and four other nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States reject Russia's proposal to maintain unified armed forces.
* Dahmer sentenced to 15 terms of life in prison
20 years ago, NASA began mapping the surface of Mars and the Sierra Leone Civil War came to a close.
20/30 years is around the line where "Vintage" starts to come into play. PowerPC Macs are on the edge of "Vintage" but their mid-90s Motorola68k based versions are definitely there.
EU existed from some time.
In order to be "vintage" in retrocomputing terms it'd need to evoke a different time. Windows 2000 is... just Windows, but with less bling. It's not like an Amiga, with its idiosyncratic OS, or a BBC micro, booting up to a menu of what ROM's were inserted in the motherboard sockets. Or even modern zOS, which workflows that are kind of based on stacks of punch cards and tapes, even though both are virtualized and abstracted into tiered storage and everything runs on freakishly fast hardware.
"Vintage design refers to an item of another era that holds important and recognizable value. This style can be applied to interior design, decor and other areas." [1]
Note that 'holds important and recognizable value' is subjective and broad (as is 'other areas'). In the context of retro computing, you can easily make an argument for such, as I could for an SGI Indy and SGI Octane and SGI Tezro (or, practically any SGI, though I never owned a Tezro nor an Origin series. Electricity bill was high enough with an Octane).
How about this rule of thumb: if you can't securely use it online, it is vintage. Latest SGI IRIX version? Vintage. Any PalmOS devices? Vintage. This device is put online with what, WEP? I wouldn't hang such on my internet connection directly, that's for sure. Its OK if you want to run Windows XP or Windows 2000 or Amiga OS. Just don't put the damn thing online on the internet, connecting to remote devices with ancient TCP/IP stacks, outdated browsers (even embedded!).
FTA: "Unfortunately however PQA files can no longer use the Internet as Palm’s proxy under “proxy.palm.net” is no longer in service." The irony here is that I consider that a Good Thing (tm).
My Android device from 4 years ago with no longer a valid root for Let's Encrypt certificates? Vintage.
My wife is into antiques, and tells me that anything older than 25 years is "vintage," and anything older than 100 years is "antique."
However, there is some fuzziness with "antique," as some people put that line at 50 or 75 years, depending on the item. In those cases, 100 years is referred to as a "proper antique."
So I was going to answer "of course, 2002 is vintage, it's 20 years old".
But I checked and I was wrong, it comes from the wine world.
Thanks to you, TIL
Most people don't read everything published on the internet annually, and things that are no longer trending on TikTok or HackerNews can still be interesting.
I guess I am just getting old?