Palm Pilots

It was the year 1990’s something and something came out as a digital personal Assistant. Something that changed my world to its fullest. What was this device called?

Palm Pilot

My work started to sell these in the late 1990s and I was able to get one in 1999 for free. I had found a Palm Pilot that someone was trying to steal and some of the parts were missing and they gave it to me.

It was a great little device, I could sync it with my Microsoft Outlook with the software and move all my contacts, calendar items, and tasks (reminders). It made it really nice to have all my contacts on a PDA. Then I didn’t have to put them all on my cell phone. I just had to carry around two devices.

I then moved on to the Palm IIIc the first color one

Then I moved on to Tungsten T5, it was a better version then what I started with.

Then they moved into the cell phone era.

History

They started in 1992, and they were a division of U.S. Robotics in 1996.  The inventors were Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan.  If you have ever heard of the Tandy and the Apple Newton, and a handheld by the Go Corporation. They learned from those before them.

Over time they built and released several models. When the later models came with Palm OS it opened up to different things. I used mine to sync with Franklin Planners. They moved from the binder to the handheld. We haven’t talked about the Franklin planner yet, I will later. I still was able to connect to Microsoft through the Palm OS and Franklin Planner connection. So I had access to my contacts, calendar, and task (reminders)

Handspring

Later on, Palm become a 3Com company, and the founders didn’t feel like they had control over the product, so they left the company and created a company called Handspring in June of 1998.

It ran on the Palm OS and it becomes the first company to use the Palm OS license. They went until about 2003 where it was brought out by Palm.

The major difference between Palm and handspring was that the later connected via USB and not serial sync. What a difference that made. A huge difference.

My opinion

I had to get a couple of serial Sync connections to have at work, home and on my laptop. These were nice as I was looking for something that would take me away from the paper version of planning and move to the digital age. I started to do things in Outlook and that was a nice way of planning as everything was there. I loved the Palm Pilot and I used them/it a lot. This was a major step into the coming technology.

I was going to do a video of all the Palm Pilots I have had over the years, but that will have to wait until I can get to them. We are currently moving rooms and boxing up stuff. So I will get to all the Palm Pilots I had and some of the accessories.

Citation

I got some of the data from Wikipedia.org