Serially-attached SD for old PalmOS devices
dmitry.gr
dmitry.gr
I feel like Android and iOS sort of forgot about the professional and semi-professional market segments, which have been drowned out by broader demand and had their preferred featureset designed out in favour of an experience with a broader market appeal.
Opening a Palm device feels like you're being invited to schedule something, take note of something, or otherwise make a productive choice. Opening my phone feels like I'm supposed to respond to WhatsApp and browse shitposts on Reddit.
They were definitely not perfect, but at the time (and at my budget as a middle school student), Palm devices were the only way to have a pocket-sized computer of my own that I could bring to and use in school.
The shareware community was amazing, and it's almost impossible to imagine how much stuff I could fit into 2 MB of total system memory: An eBook reader and a couple of books, several games (shout out to Space Trader), a TV remote control, offline newspaper articles...
Only to see it all disappear in a heartbeat when changing batteries, with no way to restore while traveling for the summer! (My m100 had a flaky capacitor and would sometimes do that.)
Maybe it was designed by people who couldn't hear it? High-pitched sounds are supposedly the first to go with age/tinnitus/etc: https://mosquitoloiteringsolutions.com/why-mosquito/sound-de...
This technology required a high-voltage (~100V) squarewave across the mostly-capacitive EL panel. This squarewave was at audio frequencies.
The panel also happened to function as a piezo tweeter, depending on mounting.
I worked for a cell phone company at the time. I have two memories of this technology:
1. Using the prototype phone out of its case and touching the 100 V squarewave to my ear. That's some tender skin...
2. Using a primary transformer in reverse as an audio transformer, to play the lab stereo over EL panel. It turns out the panel color changes a little bit with frequency.
What really lost me was the hardware. Unfortunately the Pre/Pre 2 was very underpowered and extremely limited in choice of carrier.
There’s a lot of reasons why WebOS never ‘made it’, but I think hardware, for myself - was a huge limitation I could never get past.
And to top it off, it's all done while working within the limitations of a mid-1990s device. Desktop computers were limited enough back then, but this is a portable device and is even more limited.
To those who haven't worked in this environment (I used to write Palm apps), it may be hard to appreciate exactly how limited. For example, the article mentioned heap size. I forget the exact numbers, and it varied from one device to another, but the total heap for your entire program was something like 32 kilobytes on some devices.