Birth of the Pilot PDA

Sabah Arif writes "Braeburn has published an in depth history of how Palm Computing transformed itself from a software company that published software for the Zoomer and Newton, into a hardware company with the wildly successful Pilot in 1996."

Comments

Palms issues

[walshy007]

Part of palms problem in my opinion is the fact that their devkit still only caters to the 68k, now that we see palms using 200mhz (lowest end) to upwards of 400mhz ARM processors, were still forced to use 68k code and let their emulation environment handle it (you can write really tiny portions of arm code though, but still limiting the size to like 4kb isn't nice) I think they should have done what apple did, when the arch changes, drop all support on the new arch of the old programs, sure in the early stages backwards compatibility was heavenly. Now however it's just plain silly forcing everyone to code for the old arch, also they need some form of audio chip in their device, playing pcm sound is handled through the cpu (drains battery immensely) and I can barely get 4 hours playback out of it. also their filesystem which goes by the principle "nothings a file" was apt back in the original palm days, but nowadays is just plain annoying. These are just some of my gripes with the system. why i think we don't see more serious programs for the new devices.

Unfortunately....

[smchris]

transformed itself from a software company that published software for the Zoomer and Newton, into a hardware company with the wildly successful Pilot in 1996."

The hardware was crap. That has been my business motto about Palm: "A fine concept made flesh in cheap crap."

I believe mine said made in Mexico. It was one of the ones that would drain a charge in four days. Unfortunately, while I usually let stuff lie around, my wife convinced me to toss it before the class action suit's resolution was announced the other month.

Now her's is showing the same sympthoms.

Re:I got 9 years out of my PalmPilot Pro

[LaTechTech]

My palm pilot professional still works (back light and all). Five years back I thought it had met its demise. The screen turned mostly black. The reset button did not fix it. I put it on a shelf thinking maybe it could be fixed. Three years later I took it off the shelf, turned it on, and saw the same black screen. I decided to pull and reseat the memory. That did the trick.

Re:I got 9 years out of my PalmPilot Pro

[AndroidCat]

I bought a refurbished Palm IIIe a few months ago for $25 CDN. It does the basic functions fine. I wouldn't mind rechargable batteries, better resolution, colour, USB/Blue Tooth sync, SD/MMC memory cards, etc, etc, but no way am I upgrading until I've driven this one to its ($25) limits.