Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Don't Write Them Off: A Palm Retrospective

Posted by Unknown on from the good-old-days dept.

An anonymous reader writes "OSNews' managing editor Thom Holwerda has posted a lavish five-part retrospective on Palm, covering its history, user interface, internal technology, and competition. Holwerda first pays tribute to the pioneers of automatic handwriting recognition, including two remarkable stylus tablets (connected to mainframe computers) produced by RAND Corporation during the 1960s. The action picks up a couple decades later as Jeff Hawkins implements a handwriting recognition engine for his employer, the makers of the high end GRiD compass (MS-DOS) laptop. Hawkins dreamed of developing handwriting recognition for a device small enough to be carried around in one's pocket and cheap enough to be sold to a mass market. Along the way he had an epiphany: instead of trying to recognize the user's natural handwriting, why not create a simple alphabet that could be recognized reliably by the software? When Bill Gates entered the game, Hawkins had another big idea: why not compete against the Microsofts of the world by having fewer features, instead of more?" The handwriting recognition part is chock full of screenshots and video demos of early recognition systems, too.

5 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Still Carry a Palm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I still keep my appointments on a Palm Zire. The simplicity is hard to beat, and I mastered the stylus alphabet many years ago. It's a little thick in my pocket, and many people have asked me about my special cellphone.

  2. Nice device but never moved with the times by ranulf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I loved my Palmpilots - I still own two even now, but their real problem from a programmer's perspective was the overly restrictive 64KB model and having to use a database for all storage. That meant everything had to be especially written for the palmpilot and it was difficult to include support in a cross-platform programs. Not impossible, but it felt like it was Palm or everything else at times. As the devices got better and better, the tiny memory restrictions just got more ridiculous.

    Also, there was some developer support issues - for instance, I remember at the time when people wanted to create pdb files offline and the official response was "we don't know what the pdb format is because the MS runtime handles that" was just ridiculous. Obviously, it was possible to reverse engineer the format, but a company not having documentation on its one and only file format isn't great.

    That said, the API was well thought out and nice to use. Just different to everything else.

  3. Misty watercolor memories by jtownatpunk.net · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Palm's handwriting innovation wasn't technological. It was psychological. They managed to convince consumers that it was cool and hip to learn to write in a way that the device could interpret. That made the technical aspect much more manageable.

    That's one of the reasons the Newton bombed. Apple tried to build a system that could interpret natural writing but that's an incredibly difficult thing when writing styles are as unique as fingerprints. I didn't even bother waiting to get my hands on a demo unit at the launch because people were walking away complaining that it was impossible to get the Newton to accurately recognize anything written on it. That had been the Really Big Thing Killer Feature and it was underwhelming. So I'm supposed to walk this thing through learning my writing? Ain't nobody got time for that! Somehow, Palm convinced people to learn how to write all over again. I tip my hat to their memory.

    1. Re:Misty watercolor memories by urdak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Palm's handwriting innovation wasn't technological. It was psychological. They managed to convince consumers that it was cool and hip to learn to write in a way that the device could interpret. That made the technical aspect much more manageable.

      It wasn't just "cool and hip" to use Palm's new writing style - it was also fast and more reliable - e.g., when writing A just write an upside-down V and don't write the middle line.

      I remember a conference I attended in 1999, where for 3 days I sat and wrote notes on my Palm V. Palm's writing technique was very fast, very convenient (the device was very small, and I could write without looking at the screen all the time - which you can't do on today's smartphones) and also - after 3 days of writing, I still had half my battery left!

      I wish that Palm would have continued to build devices and operating systems...

  4. Palm: The alternate history of Apple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Decent article, although the conclusion (that Palm should have built a new device based on Cobalt or any of mess coming out of Access) is misguided.

    The story of Palm is not too far flung from the story of Apple in the 90's. Architecturally, Palm OS was similar to the classic Mac OS: handle-based memory management, limited multitasking (using event loop tricks), and no memory protection. Both products were simple, elegant, and popular in their heyday.

    But eventually, the designs that worked well for old 68000 processors with miniscule amounts of RAM and processing powers started to get creaky. Both Apple and Palm switched chips (PowerPC and ARM, respectively) with emulation layers, which extended the lifespan of the aging OS even longer. Both experimented with licensing the OS to other manufacturers, with poor results for the bottom line.

    Apple started writing a "next-gen" version of Mac OS, called Copland. Palm/PalmSource started writing Cobalt. Both attempts were ultimately too complex and mismanaged to actually ship, despite all their "promise". Apple tried to buy BeOS, but Be wanted $200 million. Palm bought Be in its decline for $11 million and change.

    Apple finally succeeded in putting classic Mac OS to rest by switching to a modern UNIX-based OS. The lesson is that writing your own OS from scratch is freakin' hard. Palm started fresh with webOS, built on a Linux core. Ultimately, thanks to years of mismanagement and stagnation during the times when the company was making loads of money in the 90's, it was too late for Palm. And then they had to compete with the original Apple: Apple.

    On top of that, a number of ex-PalmSource employees had long ago ditched Access and went on to work on what would become Android ... which included using the Binder IPC technology originally developed at Be.