Palm OS and the units that ran it: An Ars retrospective

“Devices aren’t enjoyable anymore,” sighed my spouse, watching me faucet away on my Palm Zire 72 as she sat on the sofa along with her MacBook Air, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch.

And it’s true: The smartphone has all however eradicated whole courses of devices, from point-and-shoot cameras to MP3 gamers, GPS maps, and even flashlights. However arguably no type of gadget has been so completely outdated as the private digital assistant, the hand-held laptop that dominated the late ’90s and early 2000s. The PDA even set the template for how its smartphone successors would render it out of date, transferring from easy private data administration to embody video games, messaging, music, and pictures.

However simply as smartphones would do, PDAs supplied a dizzying array of working programs and purposes, and an ideal a lot of them ran Palm OS. (I purchased my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there’s no manner we might enumerate each single such machine on this article. So on this Ars retrospective, we’ll look again at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm working system and the units that ran it—and the way they paved the best way for what we use now.

When Zoom(er) wasn’t assembly software program

Within the mid-to-late Eighties, moveable computing primarily meant both heavy, luggable workstations or a novel class of pocket computer systems with tiny screens, small recollections, and calculator-like keyboards. Jeff Hawkins, then vp of analysis at moveable programs builder GRiD, thought he might do higher. He needed to construct a system the place the display screen itself turns into the enter machine, changing keyboards with pens and styluses.

Whereas handwriting recognition was a good greater problem for programs again then, Hawkins’ PalmPrint system simplified the duty by merely matching strokes to characters as a substitute of making an attempt to acknowledge whole phrases. PalmPrint grew to become GridPen, the core of the 1989 GriDPad 1900, or what we might name immediately the primary commercially profitable pill laptop. Utilizing a resistive 10-inch black-and-white LCD because the display screen and writing floor, it ran MS-DOS on a lower-power 10 MHz Intel 80C86 and weighed nearly two kilograms (4.5 kilos), promoting at an MSRP of $2,500 (about $6,200 in 2024 {dollars}).

The GriDPad line went on to be very profitable for GRiD, however Hawkins more and more thought of his personal creation to be too cumbersome and costly. Surveying current GriDPad company prospects a couple of moveable machine they’d personally use, the suggestions was unanimous: It needed to be quite a bit lighter, quite a bit smaller, and below a cool grand.

GRiD itself wasn’t concerned with producing a low-end mass-market machine, however such a unit was nicely throughout the market vary of Tandy Company, GRiD’s father or mother since 1988 and the homeowners of Radio Shack. Tandy administration was entranced by the idea of what Hawkins known as the “Zoomer,” a lot in order that the corporate was prepared to speculate $300,000 in Hawkins’ new enterprise to develop it, which he known as Palm Computing.

Hawkins chosen GeoWorks’ PC/GEOS because the working system primarily based on its confirmed skill to run on cheap {hardware}, and Tandy introduced on longtime accomplice Casio (additionally a serious pocket laptop producer) as the brand new machine’s OEM. To handle the rising firm, Hawkins employed Apple-Claris alumnus Donna Dubinsky as CEO and later Ed Colligan as VP of promoting, contemporary from Macintosh peripherals maker Radius.

Sadly, the Zoomer’s growth grew to become more and more troubled on account of company interference and software program churn, and though underclocking its x86-compatible CPU to 7 MHz dramatically prolonged its battery life, it additionally made the unit sluggish and ponderous. Nonetheless, the Zoomer acquired to market in October 1993 at a pound in weight (lower than half a kilogram) and for $599 ($1,240 in 2024), markedly undercutting Apple’s Newton MessagePad. Alternatively, it was nonetheless too massive and was mainly handled (and judged) as a PC, and although its handwriting recognition was higher than the Newton’s, it was nonetheless outsold 4 to 1.