The Obituary
The PalmPilot, launched by Palm in 1996, made the personal digital assistant a mainstream object. It held your calendar, contacts, to-do list, and memos in a slab that fit a shirt pocket, and you fed it text by drawing Graffiti strokes with a stylus. A cradle and the HotSync button kept it mirrored to a desktop PC. Palm OS spawned the Treo smartphones, but Palm misjudged the touchscreen era; the iPhone and Android made stylus organizers obsolete, and HP killed the last Palm devices in 2011.
Worth remembering
- Users learned Graffiti, a simplified stroke alphabet, to write on the screen with a plastic stylus.
- You synced it to a PC by dropping it into a cradle and pressing a single HotSync button.
Sources
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.