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

I got 9 years out of my PalmPilot Pro

[MichaelSmith]

...and this is the first time I have read TFA all the way through.

A couple of months ago I finally retired the second of my 1996 vintage PalmPilots, and replaced it with a Zire 31.

In the nine years since I shelled out my $500 aud I found one or two bugs in the os and bundled applications. I used it practically every day for all those years. Based on that record the Palm is the most bug free application I have used, by at least an order of magnitude.

The Zire has better hardware. The digitiser doesn't go out of calibration at all (so far) it has better hardware and somewhat better software, but it is not nine years better.

The original Palm deserved to succeed because it was well engineered. Before I had the palm I mucked around with a little casio organiser. It cost be $70 or so. I lost the data a few times and gave up.

The palm was a great example of how sometimes you have to go up in the market to create a product worth buying. I mean from the 70 buck casio to the 500 buck palm. I paid the extra money because it was worth it.

Okay, back to OnboardC.

My Palm Rules

[Crixus]

Last year around this time my Palm III died and I had to break down and get a Zire 31. I noticed someone else said something similar...

I find my Palm to be a very valuable piece of tech to have. In my line of work I make a LOT contacts and need a conveniant place to organize them. I must admit that this is 99% of what I use my Palm for.

I keep work related notes in it, and have also found it to be a useful tool to help me remember family and friend's birthdays. I'm really bad when it comes to remembering names.

Plus it can run cool little other apps like the Enigma Machine emulator that I fool around with. :-)

The standard Palm applications were okay

[hattig]

But they weren't great.

A bloody PDA should come with applications that were simply better than the ones that came with the Palm. I had a Palm IIIc, and I remember the limitations bugged me (poor notes and todo list applications, for example).

The problem is that PalmOS and the applications got early-mover advantage in the market by having these limitations. The low-end Palms of today are basically price-reduced variants that run faster. However the high-end Palm hardware and software didn't advance at the same rate as the rest of the market, and Microsoft overtook them eventually with a product that had a vastly superior underlying system. Symbian is also mostly there as well, and my free-with-contract Motorola A1000 runs rings around the functionality of my old Palm IIIc. Hell, my iPod nano has a lot of the core PDA functionality that people need, although lacking input of course.

Palm in around 2000-2003 should have realised that the current OS and software was a dead-end, and they should have started afresh with, for example, Linux as an underlying OS, and a Palm-like UI on top, without any of the limitations of the old OS, or the limitations that arose from migrating to ARM on the hardware side, but not the software side(!!). Then a legacy Palm emulation application should have been written and possibly integrated into the OS to minimise disruption during the migration period.

Instead we got Palm OS 5.

Cool seeing Zoomer reference!

[jbarr]

I cut my PDA teeth on a Zoomer. It was so cool at the time being able to have a write-on PDA. The availability of Graffiti really made it shine. And it was quite hackable. Lots of goodies and tools out there to hack GEOS and run DOS programs. I remember writing on one of the Zoomer mailing lists with some buddies about features we would have loved to see developed in PDA's. Lo and behold, within a year later, the Pilot 1000 surfaced, and had much of what we discussed. I'm certainly not saying we were influential in the Pilot's design, but it was great to see that we were thinking along the same lines as the Pilot 1000 developers!

Later, I upgraded from the Zoomer to a US Robotics Pilot 1000, and was hooked ever since, later owning a Palm III, Palm Vx, Sony Clie SJ20, Sony Clie NX70V, Palm Tungsten T3, and currently, a Palm Tungsten C.

But is was the Zoomer that got me hooked. In fact, I purchased two, and gave one to my wife. She just loved it. I really wish I hadn't sold them off years ago. Did anyone else just love the neat rubbery feel of the Zoomer's case? Something about it just made it pleasing to hold and use...

Re:Cool seeing Zoomer reference!

[bryan_chow]

I was working at GeoWorks at the time, and I wrote Blackjack and Poker for the Zoomer (part of the Quick Shuffle Game Pack). Developing software for it, like that for any GEOS application at the time, was funky - you develop it on a Sun workstation connected to a PC. I never had access to a Zoomer during development. My programs were developed completely on the PC and they just ran on the Zoomer. And everything had to be written in assembly (although GeoWorks did manage to create a C development solution after a lot of delays, on which the spreadsheet was written in).