By Scott Colvey on Sunday, 02 September 2007
 Surely everyone remembers the Palm Pilot? It was the PDA du jour for the second half of the 1990s and anyone who was anyone owned one. If you had a busy life, the details would be stored electronically on your Palm Pilot. Except... the first model wasn't actually called that. No, the very first 'Palm Pilot' was made by US Robotics in 1996, and it was called the Pilot 1000.
However, while the word 'Palm' did not appear on the device -- or even its packaging -- it was the Palm Computing division of US Robotics that made the Pilot 1000. Soon, the term 'Palm Pilot' was adopted by the masses as a generic term for, well, pretty much any PDA that looked or worked a bit like the original Pilot, in much the same way as people might do a spot of hoovering. US Robotics quickly cottoned on to this and by the device's second generation, it was rebranded as the Palm Pilot.
But what was it about the Palm Pilot that so caught the zeitgeist? It's an interesting question because in hindsight, the Pilot appears to have offered nothing particularly new. Handwriting-recognition technology in a handheld was introduced three years earlier by Apple with the Newton (albeit not terribly successfully); and some contemporary PDAs, like the Psion Siena, were barely bigger and offered better functionality.
Well, computing history is littered with the chassis of better products that have died where weaker competitors have thrived. Perhaps the Palm Pilot became too much of a fashion statement to fail? If that sounds dismissive, then know that we believe the Pilot 1000 was more than just a fad. Certainly the shirt-pocket size and 750-contact capacity formed a large part of the manufacturer's marketing, but the Pilot it nailed storage, synchronisation and simplicity of use like no other handheld before. The basic strokes of the Pilot's Graffiti handwriting-recognition system made for reliable data entry, while pressing the HotSync button with the Pilot sat in its PC-connected cradle would ensure that all stored information was safely backed up. So, yes it was fashionable, but it was also properly functional.
Subsequent models introduced slimmer designs and colour screens, but Palm's fortunes soon began to falter. 3Com's buyout announcement in 1997 sent US Robotics stock soaring, but the ensuing sale wasn't entirely trouble-free. Palm's founders, Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins, soon became dissatisfied with the way their new bosses were running things, so they left 3Com in 1998 to start all over again. Their new company, Handspring, launched the Palm OS-powered Visor in 1999 and after a clutch of increasingly refined PDAs, the Treo 180 smartphone appeared in 2001.
What followed next for Palm and Handspring wouldn't seem out of place in a soap opera. 3Com had spun Palm off into a separate company in 1999, and Palm subsequently decided to split into separate hardware and software companies -- Palm and PalmSource -- in order to facilitate the licensing of its operating system to other handheld manufacturers. So far, so good, but Palm's decision to change its name to palmOne after the acquisition of Handspring in 2003 beggared belief. Even more astonishing was palmOne's $26.7 million payment to PalmSource -- a company it once owned -- for sole rights to the Palm brand name. The reason? So it could change its name back to Palm in 2005.
Released: 1996
Price: From US$299
Processor: Motorola Dragonball running at 16MHz
Memory: 128Kb
Size: 81 x 18 x 120mm
Weight: 162g
Screen: 160 x 160 pixels, with four monochromatic shades
Storage: Proprietary memory slot
Other notables: Graffiti handwriting-recognition system
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