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.
Still Carry a Palm (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.
Nice device but never moved with the times (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.
Re:Still Carry a Palm (Score:5, Interesting)
What happened to those pre-renders of future palms (Score:5, Interesting)
Pioneer of HWR? (Score:3, Interesting)
Palm: The alternate history of Apple (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 [wikipedia.org] technology originally developed at Be.
Re:Pioneer of HWR? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you ignore the visual similarities between the devices, such has shape and stylus input, you would find that the Palm and Newton were different devices. The design criteria were different, from an end-user and engineering perspective. This resulted in Palm cutting more corners. That benefited them because they ended up with the more successful product. (Not that it helped Palm in the long run, but that's a different story.)
Graffiti was one of the results of the corner cutting. A lot of us were fine with graffiti, but it is easy to see why it wouldn't have a mass market appeal. But it did get the job done effectively in a palm sized device. That's a lot more than could be said for other devices of the era.
Article as one long single page (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.osnews.com/print/26838/Palm_I_m_ready_to_wallow_now [osnews.com] ... instead of page by page view.
I miss my old Palm Pilot Pro (Score:4, Interesting)
I was always really into the idea of portable "palmtop" computing. Back in the 1980's, I coveted the Radio Shack pocket computers [oldcomputers.net]. The thought of being able to carry around a device in my pocket that I could program on the fly was thrilling to me. In the 90's, HP came out with the HP 200LX [wikipedia.org] which gave you a full MS-DOS computer in your pocket. Wow! Of course, this was the age of Windows, so if you wanted a GUI, HP had the Omnigo [ericlindsay.com] which was my personal favorite (it ran Geoworks GEOS on it). But, none of these really caught on with the general public. The HP200LX did have a strong cult following, but it's high price precluded wider adoption. A used one still costs over $250 on eBay, not much less than its original retail price. One thing was sure, though. Palmtops were the wave of the future, and Palm jumped in at just the right time. Their units were exceedingly popular, and I desperately wanted one, but I couldn't justify the cost for me.
Then, one day, an unexpected package arrived in my office. The unabomber had not been caught, yet, so I was a little suspicious, so I opened it. Inside was a brand new Palm Pilot Pro! A few months earlier, I had put card into a drawing for one of these at a conference, and I promptly forgot about it. After all, no one wins those contests, right? apparently, I defied history and won the contest. I immediately got the Palm III upgrade card (with an IR beam so strong, you could use it as a universal remote), and fashioned a screen protector out of an old transparency projector sheet I had lying around. I used that thing until it was worn thin. The development kit was rather sparse, but it got better, and there were other tools that became popular, like Pocket C. It's biggest limitation was the measly amount of RAM--only 2 MB. The biggest complaint I had about the unit was the battery--not the battery life, which would last weeks, but the whole power "system". It didn't have a backup battery when changing the alkaline triple A batteries. It merely had a capacitor that held the power for about a minute while changing them. Well, that capacitor went bad quickly, and I always had to resync after changing the batteries. Eventually, I soldered in a new one. The sync cradle made even less sense. Ideally, you'd have the Palm sitting next your desk as an extra calendar "window". But, you couldn't do that with the old Palms. Not only would the sync cable not power the palm in the cradle, it actually DRAINED the battery if you left it in there for any length of time! Nuts!
Still, I miss the simplicity of that little palmtop. It worked well and was quite reliable. I eventually traded it in to get $50 off a color model, which I still have, but it's not the same. It's sad how Palm just kind of disappeared. There's tons of software still floating around somewhere that is unusable. There's such little interest in the platform, that no one has even bothered to develop an emulator for Android or iPhone, which surprises me. It's almost as ig the palmtop revolution of the 90's never actually happened at all. It's certainly been mostly forgotten, even though many benefited from the technology.