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

Great thingies

[El Lobo]

I still own and actively use a Palm Pilot from 1996. No color screen, no wireless communication, no nothing. Works like a charm even today and I don't need more. Of course you CAN remove and change the battery yourself, which cannot be said of some other iGadgets.

The Zoomer and Pam Vx....mmmmmm.

[jbarr]

I still think the Palm V (and Vx) series was Palm's greatest achievement. Combined with its hard case, they had a true, front-pocketable PDA that performed well. Unfortunately, Palm PDAs have become so bloated and energy-graining that they simply aren't innovative anymore. I REALLY liked measuring battery life in weeks, not hours. And the Zoomer was a killer device at the time. It was PC-compatible that would run DOS apps, had full GUI interface thanks to Geoworks' GEOS, and it had a great implementation of an early version of Graffiti that, at the time, provided real "heads-up" stylus entry (where you could actually look at the person you were talking to while still taking notes. And what was important was that because the Zoomer and early Pilots promoted Graffiti as an input/navigation method, not handwriting recognition, it took of very effectively. The big difference with other HWR implementations was that with Graffiti, the user had to adapt their strokes to what Graffiti expected instead of the HWR engine adapting to the individual user. If you got past all that and just wrote how Graffiti wanted, it was surprisingly fast and accurate. Unfortunately, the Zoomer was overshadowed by the Apple Newton, so it never really grabbed any market share. Fortunately for Palm, (US Robotics at the time) its launch of the Pilot was successful beyond expectations, and the rest was history.

Almost like Woz pining for early days...

[PhotoGuy]

I bought one of the first palms, and remember disassembling the ROM, and looking through it. It was lean, elegant, and straight forward enough that one could do that. Try that with Windows Mobile, or probably even the newer palms (oh wait, they are windows mobile now, aren't they?)

Now, I do appreciate the greater flexibility of Windows mobile devices, and prefer it over the palm, but the speed, elegance, battery life, and so on, just aren't there. Too bad we can't have the best of both of these worlds...

Awful Article

[captainboogerhead]

Man, for once I read TFA and what do I get? A barely coherent, unedited swamp of words. Did anyone else find this article a slog to read?

Palm's buyer (and a secure feature for the Touchdown) was secured in a surprising way. During product development, Donna, Jeff and Ed were traveling the country promoting the Touchdown as the platform of choice for hardware and sofware developers.

It's never explained what Touchdown is. It's never explained what the "secure feature" is. I'm assuming Touchdown is the orginal name for what was to become the Pilot. But I don't really know. The word is just used suddenlty out without preamble, as if it had been previously introduced.

How about the following:

A simple benchmark of the efficiency or inefficiency of was to count the number of taps to create an appointment or add an entry to the adress book. This required that all of the most used features be easily accessible, not buried behind menus or in dialog boxes. This concept of ease of use had eluded many of the early PDA's.

Perhaps it's just me, but the whole article read like the above excerpt.

Another reviewer, in Macworld, found that his 'typing' speed on the Newton was "up to 20 words per minute at 0 to 95 percent accuracy."

Really? Zero to 95% accuracy? That's pretty, uh, fucking awful. Somehow I doubt that's what Macword published.

It took ten to fifteen seconds to boot up and to switch between applications, seriosuly hampering its usefulness as a serious business tool.

Wow, spelling mistake and redundancy in the same sentence.

A paper planner was much smaller and allowed the user to see his or her entire day. Little quirks like this also turned off business users.

See how the second sentence here should not follow the first? It should have followed the sentence preceeded the excerpt. This kind of construction left me rereading the same few lines several times over.

A few major candidates were considered (Motorola, Compaq and Nokia), but none of the comapnies were willing to give Palm control...

Guess that woulda bin bad fer bidness.

Hey Silicon User, hire a fucking editor!