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.