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Handhelds Hardware

Birth of the Pilot PDA 48

Posted by CmdrTaco from the little-history-lesson dept.
Sabah Arif writes "Braeburn has published an in depth history of how Palm Computing transformed itself from a software company that published software for the Zoomer and Newton, into a hardware company with the wildly successful Pilot in 1996."
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Birth of the Pilot PDA More

Birth of the Pilot PDA

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  • Broken, or just Advertising? (Score:4, Funny)

    by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:11AM (#13589121) Journal
    I saw this story a few minutes ago, but when I clicked on it I was told I couldn't read it because I was not a subscriber. Is Slashdot broken again, or is this part of some kind of subtle subscriber advertising scheme?
    • I'm not sure, because I've been a subscriber for a long time, and I can't test it.

      I think a lot of sites have become subscriber sites not for advertising purposes, but to protect their pages from defacement, to keep out trolls, and to prevent DoS attacks.

      Anyhow, except for the banner at the top of the page, I have only noticed content-related advertising, which is actually useful. When they start running p*nis enlargement ads, then I'll have something to complain about.

      Michael

  • Linux vs Palm (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
    I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community
    at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
    based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
    as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
    technology.

    I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
    back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
    for, we wanted to integrat
    • Wow, 2 machines kernel panicked in 2 days, how the fuck did you manage that. The only times I've had kernel panics have been due to flaky hardware, eg IRQ conflicts, or actual burned out components. I've had Bind and Apache both crash on my machines and never once has it caused a kernel panic. I call bullshit.

  • Braeburn? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by rossdee ( 243626 )
    AFAIK Braeburn is a type of apple (the fruit not the computer) variety #4103 We grow a lot of them in New Zealand.

    But this story doesnt seem to be anything to do with either apples (fruit of computer) and is not exactly news.
  • Now that Palm has seen success with its product, we see Microsoft taking the field over, as it tries to do with every field with a high success rate.

    • Re:demise (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TrekCycling ( 468080 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:48AM (#13589244) Homepage
      The reason for this is because the companies producing Pocket PC hardware are producing superior hardware. I'll grant you that Pocket PC may not be the most elegant OS for a PDA. I prefer Palm in this regard. But I own a Pocket PC, even though I use Linux and thus have to install all my software via Windows running over VMWare, precisely because the Pocket PCs are better devices, IMHO. I don't know what's happened lately, but Palm, in my opinion again, has gone downhill with regards to their hardware. The screens are often hard on the eyes. Or they often develop in a few months this problem where the screen buzzes or makes a high-pitched whine. I just find they're not making quality products, currently. And all the other players (Sony, Handspring, etc.) were either bought out or don't make Palms any longer.

      It's sad to see, but I think it's important to recognize that Microsoft is "winning" in this case because Palm is doing a really poor job.

  • I got 9 years out of my PalmPilot Pro (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:24AM (#13589168) Homepage Journal

    ...and this is the first time I have read TFA all the way through.

    A couple of months ago I finally retired the second of my 1996 vintage PalmPilots, and replaced it with a Zire 31.

    In the nine years since I shelled out my $500 aud I found one or two bugs in the os and bundled applications. I used it practically every day for all those years. Based on that record the Palm is the most bug free application I have used, by at least an order of magnitude.

    The Zire has better hardware. The digitiser doesn't go out of calibration at all (so far) it has better hardware and somewhat better software, but it is not nine years better.

    The original Palm deserved to succeed because it was well engineered. Before I had the palm I mucked around with a little casio organiser. It cost be $70 or so. I lost the data a few times and gave up.

    The palm was a great example of how sometimes you have to go up in the market to create a product worth buying. I mean from the 70 buck casio to the 500 buck palm. I paid the extra money because it was worth it.

    Okay, back to OnboardC.

    • My palm pilot professional still works (back light and all). Five years back I thought it had met its demise. The screen turned mostly black. The reset button did not fix it. I put it on a shelf thinking maybe it could be fixed. Three years later I took it off the shelf, turned it on, and saw the same black screen. I decided to pull and reseat the memory. That did the trick.
    • I bought a refurbished Palm IIIe a few months ago for $25 CDN. It does the basic functions fine. I wouldn't mind rechargable batteries, better resolution, colour, USB/Blue Tooth sync, SD/MMC memory cards, etc, etc, but no way am I upgrading until I've driven this one to its ($25) limits.

  • Palms issues (Score:5, Informative)

    by walshy007 ( 906710 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:30AM (#13589188)
    Part of palms problem in my opinion is the fact that their devkit still only caters to the 68k, now that we see palms using 200mhz (lowest end) to upwards of 400mhz ARM processors, were still forced to use 68k code and let their emulation environment handle it (you can write really tiny portions of arm code though, but still limiting the size to like 4kb isn't nice) I think they should have done what apple did, when the arch changes, drop all support on the new arch of the old programs, sure in the early stages backwards compatibility was heavenly. Now however it's just plain silly forcing everyone to code for the old arch, also they need some form of audio chip in their device, playing pcm sound is handled through the cpu (drains battery immensely) and I can barely get 4 hours playback out of it. also their filesystem which goes by the principle "nothings a file" was apt back in the original palm days, but nowadays is just plain annoying. These are just some of my gripes with the system. why i think we don't see more serious programs for the new devices.
    • OS 6/Cobalt and PalmOS Linux have a native ARM API.

      No one wants to release a device based on them though.

      I hear rumors of new hardware running f'ing GARNET. (5.4). Erm, isn't that 5 year old tech? I've lost count of how long Cobalt has been in the hands of licencees but I believe its getting close to two years now. (I'm guessing they have all chickened out on adding the necessary RAM to handle it)

      Mind you, the upside of keeping 68k is that Palm and others are still making money out of organizers sold years
      • yes I know of cobalt etc. problem being Palm has confirmed after Cobalt they will most likely run some form of linux... who wants to develop for a system that will only have one half-supported generation? not me. Palm os 5 has so many devices out for it it's the norm. Guess thats what the hardware manufacturers think too.

        original point was ever since after palm os 4.0 palm have been screwing devs around. It used to be such a friendly platform.

        random note: the reason I haven't tried putting linux on my arm p

  • tandy = radio shack (Score:4, Funny)

    by treebeard77 ( 68658 ) * <treebeard@treeb[ ]d.net ['ear' in gap]> on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:33AM (#13589199)
    I'm surprised there is no mention of radio shack. Tandy was a leather/crafts store until it became one with radio shack ( I forget who bought who ). I always thought it was amusing that the half I used to buy moccasin kits from was the brand name used for the computers

  • My Palm Rules (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Crixus ( 97721 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:37AM (#13589210)
    Last year around this time my Palm III died and I had to break down and get a Zire 31. I noticed someone else said something similar...

    I find my Palm to be a very valuable piece of tech to have. In my line of work I make a LOT contacts and need a conveniant place to organize them. I must admit that this is 99% of what I use my Palm for.

    I keep work related notes in it, and have also found it to be a useful tool to help me remember family and friend's birthdays. I'm really bad when it comes to remembering names.

    Plus it can run cool little other apps like the Enigma Machine emulator that I fool around with. :-)

  • Unfortunately.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by smchris ( 464899 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @08:44AM (#13589233)
    transformed itself from a software company that published software for the Zoomer and Newton, into a hardware company with the wildly successful Pilot in 1996."

    The hardware was crap. That has been my business motto about Palm: "A fine concept made flesh in cheap crap."

    I believe mine said made in Mexico. It was one of the ones that would drain a charge in four days. Unfortunately, while I usually let stuff lie around, my wife convinced me to toss it before the class action suit's resolution was announced the other month.

    Now her's is showing the same sympthoms.

           

  • curves vs corners (Score:4, Funny)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @09:00AM (#13589278)
    Hawkins quickly nixed the idea, reasoning that curves never saved space
     
    If the thing was circular then it would have the *most* interior space per unit of side material. But a round PDA would be kinda funky to hold and operate...

  • They missed the best part (Score:3, Funny)

    by sabre307 ( 451605 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @09:12AM (#13589324) Homepage
    They mentioned that Hawkins made a mock-up out of balsa wood, but they neglected to mention the funniest part of the story. He also made a wooden stylus, and would walk around tapping on the wood with the stylus and talking into it. It was his way of "testing" the design. Must have been funny as hell to see him walking around the streets outside his office doing that!!!!

  • The standard Palm applications were okay (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @09:22AM (#13589353) Journal
    But they weren't great.

    A bloody PDA should come with applications that were simply better than the ones that came with the Palm. I had a Palm IIIc, and I remember the limitations bugged me (poor notes and todo list applications, for example).

    The problem is that PalmOS and the applications got early-mover advantage in the market by having these limitations. The low-end Palms of today are basically price-reduced variants that run faster. However the high-end Palm hardware and software didn't advance at the same rate as the rest of the market, and Microsoft overtook them eventually with a product that had a vastly superior underlying system. Symbian is also mostly there as well, and my free-with-contract Motorola A1000 runs rings around the functionality of my old Palm IIIc. Hell, my iPod nano has a lot of the core PDA functionality that people need, although lacking input of course.

    Palm in around 2000-2003 should have realised that the current OS and software was a dead-end, and they should have started afresh with, for example, Linux as an underlying OS, and a Palm-like UI on top, without any of the limitations of the old OS, or the limitations that arose from migrating to ARM on the hardware side, but not the software side(!!). Then a legacy Palm emulation application should have been written and possibly integrated into the OS to minimise disruption during the migration period.

    Instead we got Palm OS 5.
  • Wasn't the Palm Pilot first developed and sold by US Robotics, after it became owned by 3Com?

    Certainly the first Palm Pilots were branded US Robotics.

  • No Troll, I'm wondering what the hell happened to the programmers after version 5?

    Bill

  • Cool seeing Zoomer reference! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Sunday September 18, 2005 @02:52PM (#13590875) Homepage
    I cut my PDA teeth on a Zoomer. It was so cool at the time being able to have a write-on PDA. The availability of Graffiti really made it shine. And it was quite hackable. Lots of goodies and tools out there to hack GEOS and run DOS programs. I remember writing on one of the Zoomer mailing lists with some buddies about features we would have loved to see developed in PDA's. Lo and behold, within a year later, the Pilot 1000 surfaced, and had much of what we discussed. I'm certainly not saying we were influential in the Pilot's design, but it was great to see that we were thinking along the same lines as the Pilot 1000 developers!

    Later, I upgraded from the Zoomer to a US Robotics Pilot 1000, and was hooked ever since, later owning a Palm III, Palm Vx, Sony Clie SJ20, Sony Clie NX70V, Palm Tungsten T3, and currently, a Palm Tungsten C.

    But is was the Zoomer that got me hooked. In fact, I purchased two, and gave one to my wife. She just loved it. I really wish I hadn't sold them off years ago. Did anyone else just love the neat rubbery feel of the Zoomer's case? Something about it just made it pleasing to hold and use...
    • I was working at GeoWorks at the time, and I wrote Blackjack and Poker for the Zoomer (part of the Quick Shuffle Game Pack). Developing software for it, like that for any GEOS application at the time, was funky - you develop it on a Sun workstation connected to a PC. I never had access to a Zoomer during development. My programs were developed completely on the PC and they just ran on the Zoomer. And everything had to be written in assembly (although GeoWorks did manage to create a C development solutio

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