Palm Before the PalmPilot

Gammu writes "SiliconUser has an in-depth history of the Palm, starting with its humble roots. The Pilot (later PalmPilot and finally just Palm) saved Palm Computing. Before the release of the Pilot, the company was subsisting (barely) on revenue from connectivity packages for HP PDA's and a version of Graffiti for the Newton. This was because its first PDA hardware product had failed under the weight of feature creep and design by committee. The first article in a series follows the early days of this company-reforming product."

Comments

Re:I miss Visor

[thethibs]

Indeed. To my mind, the Tungsten is a giant step backward. It's particularly stupid that Graffiti is what made the pilot in the first place but in the Tungsten they put Graffiti 2, which is slow, unreliable and hyper-sensitive to small timing variations. I really hope they fired the idiot who thought that was a good idea.

With the Visor and Graffiti, I could take notes continuously without looking at the screen (great for meetings). With the Tungsten and Graffiti 2, I have to keep checking that it read what I wrote or that it hasn't interpreted an "i" as "l." or vice versa. I've never figured out how to get it to consistently read an "r" or an "h". The original Graffiti was fast and sure. Graffiti 2 is so bad that I'll probably be looking for something with one of those moronic little keyboards as my next PDA. I know that is really slumming in technological backwaters, but I don't see much choice.