My original Palm IIIx | Hacker News Reader

My original Palm IIIx

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61 pointsrbanffy43 comments

I had many devices and gadgets over the decades, certainly a three digit figure.

There are only a few I really loved and consider well-rounded and beautiful while useful.

My Commodore 64 comes to mind, my 2010 aluminum unibody Mac Book Pro has a place in this list and certainly my Palm III.

The first time I saw one was with one of my superiors at a Siemens R&D facility where I interned at the time. I knew I had to have one. A little later I bought mine from a dude who brought it from a work trip to the US. I still have it, I keep it together with my copy of the O'Reilly Palm Programming book.

I used the Palm a lot in everyday life and had it always with me, so for a brief period of my life it was an invaluable tool. Its real value for me however was how it foreshadowed what was about to come. I think the looming smartphone revolution was really obvious for us Palm users. We might not have foreseen every detail (Steve Jobs ditching the stylus) but the broad strokes of what was about to happen were crystal clear.

Same, I had a Palm IIIx and it was one of my most beloved devices ever. I'm guessing nostalgia makes me remember it much better than it really was, I absolutely loved that thing

I loved this era of tech. I had a Sony CLIÉ PEG-SJ22 and used it a ton for to-do lists and random notes.

I was surprised at how easy it was to learn Graffiti and how quick it was to use it. Not as fast as typing, but better than hunting and pecking on an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. I didn't like how the stylus felt on the screen when you wrote so I cut a little piece of a post-it note and put on the area where you'd do the Graffiti strokes.

I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I was able to save some web articles onto the device. When I was on a lunch break, I'd read through the articles on that little thing. It truly felt like living in the future.

I used a tool called Plucker for my Palm Vx. It could recursively download web pages and store as a single Palm database (PDB?) that was installed on the device and then the Plucker app could be used to read the pages.

I used it with Scrapbook in Firefox, to save a bunch of articles I wanted to read and export an index file that could then be used by Plucker to import those articles.

Plucker was amazing. I used it to transform online docs into palm ebookd

The author mentions not having a backlight, but the IIIx does have a backlight. That's why there's a light symbol on the power button. Maybe he meant his is busted.

The EL backlight on the IIIs had a loud coil whine and was a gannet with batteries.

I could hear the backlight whine on all EL models. My pro was very loud.

I would love if Apple - or an e-reader manufacturer - would ever steal my favorite feature from a Palm clone - the scroll wheel placed on the side in perfect position for your thumb, from the Sony Clie series.

I initially thought that this space was encumbered with parents but Gemini Deep Research says the main patent expired in 2018: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GmWGZMe_cjszV5eEegeFiWXK...

I still miss not having page-up/page-down buttons on smartphones. They'd make doom-scrolling so much more efficient. ;)

One of the genius decisions of Jeffrey Hawkins was in being laser-focused on the price point of the Palm Pilot. He designed it to be just cheap enough to buy on impulse, which is exactly how I bought mine.

Edit: Hawkins = inventor of the Palm Pilot

Steve Jobs repeated this trick with various iPod models and finally the iPad.

Its original $499 launch price was a shock to the market because all other tablet computers were priced like luxury laptops. Apple came out with a large touchscreen device for the price of a PDA.

It’s a stark contrast to the Apple Vision Pro which is barely useful at a $3000 price point.

Agreed on the AVP price point - but just want to say I finally gave it a drive last week and was blown away by the experience.

It's definitely just a high priced concept, and maybe that's all it'll ever be, but I'd push back on the barely useful bit.

The iPad wasn't positioned to be a productivity device though. The $499 price was a surprise, but only because all the online chatter was guessing $999. It was at best a Kindle/Youtube/Netflix device. The marketing for iPad these days reflects this, the ads explicitly say "not a computer".

Tablet computers at that time ran full Windows, came with a keyboard and had pen support which the iPad didn't for many years. In fact iOS didn't even have a file manager until 2017, or mouse support until 2019.

The relationship the iPad had with tablets already in the market was basically the same as the PalmPilot vs. existing PDAs in 1997.

There was the big expensive Newton, and chunky Windows CE devices with keyboards that looked like micro-laptops. The Palm initially felt more like a toy compared to them, and it never got all the features of the Newton for example.

Hawkins was very adamant on holding back feature creep. Prior to developing the Palm Pilot he worked on the GridPad. One of the reasons that did not achieve its potential was that too many people wanted a say in defining its capabilities, leading to massive feature creep.

I got my Palm Pilot hooked up to the Internet via the infrared connection to my Ericsson GSM phone. I remember driving in my car in city traffic trying to check email holding the Palm and steering wheel in one hand and the phone at the exact right angle in the other, and thinking “this is stupid”, which it was. But it was the first time I ever received an email over a wireless connection.

I still have my palm IIIxe I have used it to write my games during Go tournaments. I have a usb/serial adaptor. The software was easy to install on linux. Just to write this comment, I have tried to use it (I have not done any tournament since 7 years), but I got an error when I enter "apt-get install pilot-link". I still have my notes on how to use it:

    https://github.com/jichu4n/pilot-link/blob/master/doc/README.usb
    https://web.archive.org/web/20160226115446/http://www.pilot-link.org/
    apt-get install  pilot-link
    export PILOTPORT=/dev/ttyUSB0
    pilot-xfer --sync=/root/.pilot
    pilot-xfer -i /home/jef/Documents/Jef/old/pilotgone.prc
    pilot-dlpsh -p /dev/ttyUSB0 -i

Does anyone knows how to get back pilot-link package ?

pilot-link was removed from Debian in 2019, as some components of the project depended on Python 2, and the upstream web site disappeared.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=937292

It looks like there's a fork at https://github.com/desrod/pilot-link, but I don't know how functional that is.

It is functional. Arch's AUR uses it as a source for `pilot-link-git` package[1]; works just fine with jPilot.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pilot-link-git

Some more patches at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/by-name/pi.... ./configure --enable-conduits && make && make install sudo export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib then it works like a charm. Thank you very much. My usb serial converter is the cheapest chinese one I found.

Tell me more about this cable. I bought a IIIxe of eBay for cheap recently for the nostalgia of it, but put it aside when I realized I couldn’t physically connect it to anything. I’d love to play with it a little more.

It is just a cheap chinese usb/serial adaptor used to plug the original serial cable of the dock. Nothing special.

This inspired me to finally grab a Sony Clie SL-10 on eBay to play around with. Been watching that model on and off for a while because it was the last AAA-powered model. No ancient rechargeable cell to deal with.

(Sigh) I really miss tech that wasn’t actively trying to exploit my brain, empty my wallet, or both.

> the non-backlit screen

If I'm not very much mis-remembering, this Palm actually did have a backlight? I think you had to long-press the little green button to activate it.

I once had an original US Robotics "Pilot". From before they even rebranded it to "Palm". Very similar looking hardware & software to this, but I guess with a slower CPU etc. Maybe I even still have it somewhere...?

You might take a look around for it. They made two original versions, the 1000 and the 5000. The 1000s are pretty hard to find nowadays (seems a lot of early adopters went for the higher memory spec).

Some folks in the community even have upgraded PalmCards (the replaceable CPU board in these) that run PalmOS 5 now, hack the display to show more bits, etc.

Can you link to the Palm OS 5 PalmCards? That seems like brain surgery.

I had the Palm Tungsten W back in the day (early 2000's), color screen, mobile access, etc. I remember people saying I was "walking around with a brick", yet here we are...

I've been using a Palm of roughly this spec as a daily driver (black and white and everything) for years at this point. Love it every single day.

I had a number of PalmPilots over the years, I loved those little devices! I also remember using a keyboard dock with one of them to take notes during meetings.

I'm pretty sure I had a PalmPilot Professional, a Palm V, and a Tungsten T (which slid open). The Palm V was easily my favourite, it was a very good looking device that worked very well. In comparison, the Tungsten T was somewhat clunky.

I had the Vx with foldable keyboard dock. That keyboard was way better than a lot of notebook keyboard nowadays.

Slightly amusing - you only had about 5 keyboard layouts to chose from, and one of them was Dvorak (which I'm using).

I eventually wanted to carry only one device, and went for the Treo line of phones, which I stuck to until 2010.

I got the (old) Treo 650 (or sinilar) from my father as he bought a new one back when I was a teenager. I was the only one with a handheld at school (I was maybe 13/14 years old), and I had a funny discussion with teachers about task management on a handheld (they obviously were overwhelmed by a teenager consisting tasks belong in a handheld, not a physical notebook).

I think it still was one of the best handhelds ever produced.

The Treo 650 was the seemingly perfect blend of a color IIIc with tactile keyboard, stylus, cell phone capabilities and good ol PalmOS.

Worked issued me a Windows Mobile based Palm Treo (probably a 700wx), but I'm honestly not sure. It was decidedly not great, but mostly did the job. It was eventually replaced by a Blackberry of some kind which worked a lot better.

IMAX emulates PalmPilot software to power Oppenheimer’s 70 mm release

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/imax-emulates-palmpi...

I had almost all of them and the Treo smartphones.

Also one of the best were Psion's. Very well designed keyboard and the software was also good.

Now with so much hardware capabilities the usability can be much worse. I don't know how they did it, but the limited hardware functionality made the interfaces hard to do the UI.

I remember connecting my palm via IR to my cellphone and fetch news articles to read later offline.

Was I the only one who used this device primarily to read books?

I remember the Zire 31 was marketed as an e-reader and came with "The Wizard of Oz" preloaded. I remember uploading "The Hacker Crackdown" to mine as it was available freely.

That was the primary use of my Palm V. It's a major use of my phone, now, too

I couldn't read it. As soon I saw all cat hairs I started snizzing. Is this transmedia?

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