Palm pilots

Palm (aka Palm Computing or Palm, Inc.) is an American technology company that developed and designed Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, and software. Palm devices are often remembered as 'the first wildly popular handheld computers,' responsible for ushering in the smartphone era. Palm's first PDAs ran the Palm OS, were smaller than competing handhelds, and proved to the industry that there was a market for a new category of portable computing device. Palm (aka Palm Computing or Palm, Inc.) is an American technology company that developed and designed Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, and software. Palm devices are often remembered as 'the first wildly popular handheld computers,' responsible for ushering in the smartphone era. Palm's first PDAs ran the Palm OS, were smaller than competing handhelds, and proved to the industry that there was a market for a new category of portable computing device. Palm Computing was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins and acquired by U.S. Robotics in 1995 for $44 million. The company released their first device, the PalmPilot 1000, in 1996. The company continued to make Palm branded PDAs and smartphones until 2010. Palm released the popular webOS operating system in 2009. WebOS was used on various Palm and HP devices until it was acquired by LG in 2013—LG continues to use webOS on their smart TVs. Palm has been bought and sold several times since its founding. In April 2010 it was announced that Hewlett-Packard would acquire Palm for around $1.2 billion. Although HP kept the Palm brand initially, all PDAs released after 2011 were branded as HP devices, not Palm. In January 2015, TCL Corporation announced that it had acquired Palm's intellectual property (but not webOS) from HP, with plans to relaunch the company at some point. On October 15, 2018, a San Francisco start-up named Palm and backed by TCL released a new companion device, also called Palm. Pilot was the name of the first generation of personal digital assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996 (by then a division of U.S. Robotics). The inventors of the Pilot were Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan, who founded Palm Computing in 1992. The original purpose of this company was to create handwriting recognition software, named PalmPrint, and personal information management (PIM) software, named PalmOrganizer for the PEN/GEOS based Zoomer devices. Their research convinced them, however, they could create better hardware as well. Before starting development of the Pilot, Hawkins said he carried a block of wood, the size of the potential Pilot, in his pocket for a week. Palm was widely perceived to have benefited from the notable, if ill-fated, earlier attempts to create a popular handheld computing platform by Go Corporation, Tandy, and Apple Computer (Newton). The prototype for the first Palm Connected Organizer was called 'Palm Taxi'. IN 1996 Palm released its first generation PDA, the PalmPilot 1000 and 5000. After the out-of-court settlement in 1998 of a trademark infringement lawsuit brought by the Pilot Pen Corporation, the company no longer used that name, instead referring to its handheld devices as Palm Connected Organizers or more commonly as 'Palms'. The first Palms, the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000, had no infrared port, backlight, or flash memory, but did have a serial communications port. Their RAM size was 128 kB and 512 kB respectively, and they used version 1 of Palm OS. Later, it became possible to upgrade the Pilot 1000 or 5000's internals to up to 1 MB of internal RAM. This was done with the purchase of an upgrade module sold by Palm, and the replacement of some internal hardware components. Originally, it was conceived that all Palm PDAs were to be hardware-upgradable to an extent, but ultimately, this capability gave way to external memory slots and firmware-upgradable flash memory after the Palm III series. The next couple of Palms, the PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional, had backlit screens, but no infrared port or flash memory. Their RAM size was 512 kB and 1024 kB respectively. They used version 2 of the Palm OS.