Don't Write Them Off: A Palm Retrospective 102
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.
Misty watercolor memories (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.
Re:Misty watercolor memories (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...
CEO fail (Score:3, Insightful)
Palm's technology was incredible & ahead of it's time until it wasn't. The CEO and other C-team needs to keep pulse on the market and focus their organization and how they need to change to be relevant on the future.
For this they were out of tune completely. CEO fail. They were not able to execute on even simple improvements until way too late.
Not that it is uncommon, tons of examples of this exist today. Blackberry anyone? Maybe a Nokia device?
Re:Misty watercolor memories (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you serious? The image Palm had back in the day was "only used by nerds," and their later devices switched to a thumb keyboard and wouldn't even let you use the Graffiti writing system without modding the OS. Nobody thought having to learn a special writing system was cool. It was the computer nerd equivalent of learning Klingon.
Are you pulling these memories out of your ass?