Palm OS

» see palm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I missed Palm OS the way you miss a gadget that never made it to your shelf. A Palm Pilot was an imported executive toy in Turkey, expensive and specific, the kind of thing you read about in a magazine and did not hold. I was a student on dial-up whose pocket computer was a notebook and a pen. The whole PDA idea reached me as a picture before it reached me as a device, and by the time devices in my hands could do this job, they were phones.

Palm OS shipped in March 1996 on the Pilot 1000, a small slab you wrote on with a stylus using Graffiti, a simplified alphabet you had to learn so the machine could keep up. That trade, you meet the computer halfway, felt like the future when the alternative was a paper diary. It held your calendar and your address book and synced them to a desktop through a cradle, and for a while that was the entire promise of mobile computing.

It did not stay a Palm thing. The operating system was licensed out, so it ran on Handspring's Visor, on Sony's Clié line, and on handhelds from other makers who wanted in on the category. At its height it was the default brain of the whole PDA market.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

What Palm understood early was restraint. The hardware was slow and the memory was tiny, so the software stayed light and instant, and tapping through it never made you wait. In an era when Windows CE devices tried to be a shrunken PC and mostly felt like one, Palm OS felt like an appliance that respected your time.

~ the unraveling ~

The company split its software into a separate outfit called PalmSource to license the OS more widely. The next big rewrite, codenamed Cobalt, was finished but never shipped on a real device, and the version most people used, Garnet, kept getting stretched past what it was built for. PalmSource was bought by ACCESS in 2005 and the OS was renamed Garnet OS in 2007, a rebrand nobody outside the industry noticed.

~ what got buried with it ~

Palm tried to start over with webOS in 2009, a genuinely good modern system that came out just as the iPhone and Android were dividing the world between them. Choosing webOS meant abandoning Palm OS, so the old system was simply left behind. What survived is the lesson it taught: a handheld should do a few things instantly rather than everything slowly, which is the one thing the early smartphones forgot and the good ones later relearned.

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