Palm is still my favorite mobile OS ever invented. It was a joy to use, whereas my iOS and Android devices annoy me on a regular basis.
A few of the apps live on in emulation on my Android via StyleTap. One is the best astronomy map app I've ever used, another a favorite game (from back before platforms like Google turned us into product and incentivized developers to fill their stores with so much low-quality ad-infested in-app-purchase garbage).
I held onto a few models over the years which I kept as backup devices (eg. Palm V, Treo, an Enfora Wifi sled) and local copies of all the software to make 'em work. Quite confident I could bring them back to life for posterity (though secretly wish I could bring them back to life as a daily driver).
One thing I loved about Palm was the reliability of the handwriting input. It forced you to get used to the shorthand alphabet, but once you did it was so easy to take notes without even looking down. For awhile I had an Android mod that let you scratch notes using Palm script, but I don't have it now (or a phone with a stylus). For me, writing in Palm script is still almost as fast as jotting notes on paper. Come to think of it, I think it actually altered my real handwriting.
Well... e.g.
I now write capital "F" from the bottom-left to top-right. And I still write a capital "T" as an L from top-left to bottom-right. A lot of times I also write "E" as a reverse "3". I lost my initial down-stroke on "m" and ending downstroke on "u"....
Like you say, if I'm writing longhand with a good pen, I wouldn't write this way; but it definitely shaped my writing. Also, I learned cursive in 1st grade. I got my first Palm Pilot in 6th grade. It peeled back a lot of my writing style...
Really the amount of time I spend trying to just stop Android from using the wrong autocomplete words is less than what it took to jot letters out on the Palm...
The loss of Graffiti to lawyers and patent emporiums strikes me as one of the biggest setbacks to the use of modern phones and tablets. It was an order of magnitude faster for me to use it than anything currently available for handwriting recognition...
I started using Graffiti on my Newtons; under NewtOS 1.x, having it was the difference between usable pen input and not. Under 2.x, the native HWR was so much better than I really only ended up using Graffiti when I was editing an existing block of text -- but it was still very useful. And then, like almost everyone, I shifted to Palm.
I had forgotten about the lawsuit.
The issue for me was that, by the time that was muddying the water, I had moved on to a keyboard-based Treo 650 that I used off and on with sidelines in BlackBerry (about which UGH) and WinMo (UGH UGH UGH) -- until I got my first iPhone.
The Treo keyboard was good enough I didn't miss stylus input, but on the WinMo device I absolutely did. BB was its own thing, but didn't really work for me on any level.
I'm probably faster on my iPhone than I was with Graffiti, but both input mechanisms enabled fast-enough input that I was rarely frustrated at the input rate.
Are you sure thats not just 'looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses'? I loved PalmOS/Graffiti as well back then, but I am way faster nowadays just writing naturally with my S Pen and Samsungs handwriting recognition.
I couldn't find any, but you can emulate Palm on Android with the website CloudPilot.
Once I also built a proto-Grafitti symbol recognizer with a neural network in Python. (It doesn't support the Graffiti "X" because it requires two strokes).
I know this is a bit off-topic... but I'm still, to this day, completely convinced that Palm could of had a solid stake in the smartphone market if the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi were not launched with outdated specs at the time. WebOS was an innovative OS, and they implemented so many things that you now find in iOS and Android, like card/app management and swipe-to-close.
The fact that it's been shoehorned down to an OS for TVs is a bit of sting. I'm glad to see that it's still around, but I can't help but wonder what the landscape would be like if they executed better.
The Palm V I had was pretty cool back then. I had a little nokia phone with infra red, and I would load up a little news reader app before I got on the bus for a commute. The app was managed by the vendor, so the news was curated.
As the article says, the web browser was limited but it was good enough for an internet search if you wanted to settle an argument in the pub.
It also coincided with me wandering around with bulging pockets: palm V, Nokia, an MP3 player and a wallet.
Got all of it now in an old Samsung Galaxy S8, but the infra red internet setup was pretty eye opening for people who had seen nothing like that before.
You can't have a proper pub argument any more, the mobile internet kinda killed the fun of being knowledgeable without relying on an ever present search engine.
Haha I still remember the first time I pulled out my G2 in a pub to settle an argument. It was ironically in a pub with poor reception (even by those days standards) so by the time the page loaded, which I think was just Wikipedia, the conversation had already moved on.
Despite the lack of success that afternoon, I still remember that feeling of how significant a game changer these new fangled devices could be.
I had a Palm V for a while, I think it was the age right before smartphones became a thing - poor student and all. I think I paid €10 on ebay or the equivalent thereof.
It was a cute device, I mostly used it to play sudoku on. I still have it somewhere I think, I wonder if I can turn it back on. Don't think I have the charging cradle anymore though.
I ported the rather nifty Psion 5 app called PhoneMan to the Palm pilots. It allowed managing address books and sending and reading sms messages. I never quite got around to finishing the picture message functionality.
I even had sync working with the Bluetooth module and an Ericsson phone.
I had a couple of Palm devices and then a Handspring Visor, but it was HTC Typhoon which first felt like magic to me. Phone, web, email, MP3s, podcasts, RSS feeds all in a tiny device with what was a pretty big screen for a phone in those days. I had a pretty punishing commute, 2+ hours each way by train, but it became my favourite time of day.
If you ever want to bring your old PalmOS device online and can't find the rare wifi cards, is to just use PPP over Bluetooth. You can also do PPP over the hotsync cable of IR.
Palm went well into the 2000s mostly as a smartphone with the Treo, which was a superb device for its time. I remember that I was one those strange people with a giant smartphone at a time where everybody wanted the smallest cell phone possible (which makes a lot of sense if you're using the phone only as a phone).
I have a Palm Centro, still functioning as a phone, but I'm a bit puzzled as to how to update the cryptographic root certificates. Probably a really bad idea too, because it must be using some very outdated code to talk to IMAP servers over SSL.
The Palm Pre is much less troublesome in that regard - and WebOS is a pretty nice mobile OS too. I was very curious when I saw it running on a PinePhone.
I used to love these PDAs. I had an Acer N30, but at the time, these devices couldn't do that much.
I guess the relative unpopularity was given the fact that wifi or 4G wasn't ubiquitous, like it is nowadays. But oh boy did I love searching random little games for that thing and playing around with it.
I would love to get a palm sized devices today. I think the size, weight and UI were great for everyday. I don't mind it's thick if it means that the battery could be swapped with a connector (!), something almost unheard of today.
I was initially a Newton user. The Newt, for all the snarky lines about its initial HWR, was a really great device, and the size made it (at least for me) a reasonable note-taking platform in meetings and whatnot. But it was big.
When I shifted to the Palm -- which was obviously much smaller, lighter, etc; I could slip it into an inside coat pocket -- I found I was taking notes on a laptop or on paper again. The size made it less appealing to me as a notetaking platform, even though it made it MORE appealing for many other tasks.
I think one of the key ideas of the Palm was that it was supposed to cooperate with the desktop PC rather than compete with it (like the Newton and others tried - and failed - to do). Palm Desktop was a pretty good contact and calendar manager and the palm itself was supposed to be synchronized to what the desktop had. There was a brief period when I used it to answer work e-mails while flying between clients and synchronizing with my laptop from time to time (because the laptop hade the 14400 bps modem).
That simplicity enabled a very to-the-point environment. When Palms started to be able to connect themselves to the internet, a lot of the simplicity was lost. Palm could have gone the way of Danger and offer an online source of truth both PC and PDA would sync to/from, but they never went that way.
You could fairly trivially swap the battery for lithium ion with a usb-c charging circuit[1]. You can get li-ion batteries in almost any shape and size so surely you can find something to replace the old battery.
I'm not sure, but I wouldn't order lithium ion batteries from ali express. They are too volatile and ali express products are often simply too shoddy to risk it.
I had this smartphone (back in the days). Its akin to a Nokia iteration with a BlackBerry keyboard. You get a lot of keyboard given the size. Very small buttons. For a modern succesor of it, see Unihertz Titan
For a successor of Nokia Communicator (and E90 and N900/N950), see f(x)tec Pro1 (with or without (x)). For a successor of Palm(OS), see Planet Astro Slide. They all have their pros and cons.
My wife is into antiques, and tells me that anything older than 25 years is "vintage," and anything older than 100 years is "antique."
However, there is some fuzziness with "antique," as some people put that line at 50 or 75 years, depending on the item. In those cases, 100 years is referred to as a "proper antique."
It depends on your definition of 'vintage'. The broad term, does not refer to any specific culture or age:
"Vintage design refers to an item of another era that holds important and recognizable value. This style can be applied to interior design, decor and other areas." [1]
Note that 'holds important and recognizable value' is subjective and broad (as is 'other areas'). In the context of retro computing, you can easily make an argument for such, as I could for an SGI Indy and SGI Octane and SGI Tezro (or, practically any SGI, though I never owned a Tezro nor an Origin series. Electricity bill was high enough with an Octane).
How about this rule of thumb: if you can't securely use it online, it is vintage. Latest SGI IRIX version? Vintage. Any PalmOS devices? Vintage. This device is put online with what, WEP? I wouldn't hang such on my internet connection directly, that's for sure. Its OK if you want to run Windows XP or Windows 2000 or Amiga OS. Just don't put the damn thing online on the internet, connecting to remote devices with ancient TCP/IP stacks, outdated browsers (even embedded!).
FTA: "Unfortunately however PQA files can no longer use the Internet as Palm’s proxy under “proxy.palm.net” is no longer in service." The irony here is that I consider that a Good Thing (tm).
I think once you go past a certain age your attack surface shrinks again, leaving you vulnerable only to targeted attacks. I'd still think twice about trying to browse the web on XP, but on, say, Mac System 9? Or Palm through some kind of gateway that speaks modern TLS?
Yup, vintage, though you could flash pmOS or LOS or something on it, the SoC firmware is still out of date. There's a lot of insecure Android devices out there. iOS, too, but its at least more obvious in that space.
It’s old, definitely retro, but I always thought vintage meant older than that. Like how vintage cars are 50+ years old. To that end you wouldn’t call the Dreamcast “vintage gaming” (like you might with Pong machines) but you’d definitely still call it retro.
Maybe my comment comes more from a place of “oh shit I’m old” rather than a strong objection to the authors comments…
Let me make you old. The following things happened 30 years ago, give or take a few weeks:
* H W Bush meets with Yeltsin, Cold War officially declared over.
* The EU was officially formed.
* Ukraine and four other nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States
reject Russia's proposal to maintain unified armed forces.
* Dahmer sentenced to 15 terms of life in prison
20 years ago, NASA began mapping the surface of Mars and the Sierra Leone Civil War came to a close.
20/30 years is around the line where "Vintage" starts to come into play. PowerPC Macs are on the edge of "Vintage" but their mid-90s Motorola68k based versions are definitely there.
You’re listing off that that’s 30 years ago yet we are talking about 20 years ago, and barely 20 years at that. The difference between 20 and 30 is pretty significant (it’s literally 50% more).
It's predecessors like the EEC were set up in the fifties post WWII, but yes the European Union was only established in 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty.
I'm heavily into retro computing, and my cut off year is 2000. Anything newer than that is not 'retro' in my book. For vintage computing though, I think it would be before the IBM PC, so 1981.
You're talking PC gaming where as the OP was talking about consoles. PC gaming definitely matured around 2000 with many of the titles post-2000 losing their innovative "omg can computers really do that" mystique.
However for consoles 2000 slices between machines of the same generation like the aforementioned Dreamcast (pre-2000) and Gamecube (post-2000). These are systems that shared groundbreaking titles between them like Phantasy Star Online; which was one of the very first online multiplayer games for consoles (and which I still play weekly guild matches, streamed on Twitch).
After that generation of consoles the specifications for consoles were all pretty similar to PC (chipsets aside): ethernet, wireless, HDMI (the previous generation were all pre-HD too), a HDD, etc. But it was the Dreamcast (and, released much later, the Xbox) in the generation of consoles before that really pioneered this shift in paradigm for console gaming and which many of the consoles of that era only had support for via addons (GC Ethernet Adapter, PS2 Network Adaptor, HDDs for the PS2 Expansion Bay, etc. Heck, even the GC didn't ship with ethernet instead having a dial up modem, and it wasn't even as fast as 56K in most regions!)
Thus I think they deserve to be retro for the same reason that 1996-2000 for PC gaming does: they defined how the next couple of decades of gaming would look while making plenty of mistakes along the way.
> PC gaming definitely matured around 2000 with many of the titles post-2000 losing their innovative "omg can computers really do that" mystique.
They definitely lost innovation. The only innovations in gamimg were bloat and greed. That's why is more entertaining to play older titles: they are all about play, they do not try to extort you or bring your PC to the limit.
I'm a massive hard retro gamer too and if you only look at AAA titles then it's easy to see how you're right. However the gaming industry is so much bigger than EA et al. There are so many fun indie games out now that have a real embodiment of that creativity you miss.
Take Untitled Goose Game, for example. It was released 3 years ago and you play the part of a Goose who's mission it is to annoy as many people in a quaint English village as possible. The game is basically a modern day equivalent of the How to Be a Complete Bastard class of games from the Spectrum era of home systems. And it's fun too!
There's also no shortage of modern games released for older hardware. On the shelf behind me I have at least 5 games released in the last 5 years for various Sega consoles. The Gameboy and Gameboy Advance also see a surprising number of new releases each year too (though I don't collect for those consoles specifically).
The GC didn't ship with a modem at all even in early not cost reduced models. There may have been some bundles with a modem for PSO1&2 or Homeland but there was only 4 games in its entire library that could even go online.
The Dreamcast had a built in modem and some models of PS2 had one built in.
> The GC didn't ship with a modem at all even in early not cost reduced models.
Yeah that's what I meant (GC and DC too similar acronyms -- easy to typo). I did say elsewhere that the GC's online capabilities required an addon whereas the DC shipped with one).
That said, there were a few special edition Dreamcasts that shipped with the ethernet adapter instead of a modem. They weren't common but they did exist.
I've got a GC and DC sat next to me too -- unfortunately neither with an ethernet adapter. I do have a DreamPi hooked up on the DC though.
> there was only 4 games in its entire library that could even go online.
5 actually, though the 5th only went online for DLC. That said, you can argue that it's a bit of a stretch to call PSO and PSO+ different games.
It's also worth noting that there were a few other GC games that supported the ethernet addapter too albeit for LAN play rather than online. This was in addition to those games also supporting crossover cable.
> and some models of PS2 had one built in.
The original models didn't have it. It was only the slimline models that had ethernet and they were released quite late in the life of the PS2. The previous models required a hardware expansion adapter to provide online functionality (like the GC). Sony were pretty late to the game in that regard because Sega and Microsoft had already proven online gaming by that point.
I believe there was a modem adapter for the PS2 too, but I don't know much about that.
Most of the classic Palms have 68k CPUs in them, and feel more like a handheld Classic Mac than a modern smartphone. I am also a vintage snob with a low cutoff (anything after 1985 puts me to sleep) but I will give Palms and other such primitive handhelds a pass.
Nah... Windows never gets vintage. It's just old and clunky. ;-)
In order to be "vintage" in retrocomputing terms it'd need to evoke a different time. Windows 2000 is... just Windows, but with less bling. It's not like an Amiga, with its idiosyncratic OS, or a BBC micro, booting up to a menu of what ROM's were inserted in the motherboard sockets. Or even modern zOS, which workflows that are kind of based on stacks of punch cards and tapes, even though both are virtualized and abstracted into tiered storage and everything runs on freakishly fast hardware.
Windows 2000 evokes a time when Windows was still enjoyable, or at lease useable. File Manager made sense, the UI elements were distinguishable enough that it's easy to tell what you're doing, the look was consistent. Definitely nostalgia if you use Windows 10.
Well, if you go back to the meaning of the word, "vintage" is just the year when a wine was produced, so anything is "vintage" as long as the year it was produced is known. For example, the monitor standing before me right now is 2016 vintage (yeah, I know, pretty old already)...
That's a bit of a rude comment, I found the story to be very interesting. The device itself is from 2002.
Most people don't read everything published on the internet annually, and things that are no longer trending on TikTok or HackerNews can still be interesting.
It is convention on hn to tag non-current articles with the year in the title, and this tag is missing, so the comment was likely not meant to be dismissive of the content.
Presumably the intention of the GP was to mention it so that the year gets added on the submission’s title, as is usually the case with older articles.
I agree . I thought it was a excellent article with good research and problem solving. It may motivate me to get my even older palm out of my storage and rabbit around for several books and other doc I have some where. Thank you to the author.
I have a palm3 from 1998. I recall I loaded a submarine game which was quite addictive. I also recall there was a Palm Treo around 2006? and later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo Probably influenced Steve Jobs idea of the 1st iPhone Would be interesting to examine the differences between later palms and 1st iPhone ......
It's common to add the year to articles which are not from current year. Sometimes the date in the article is only at the end and you want to know if what's your going to read is from now or from the past.
It's a difference to read an article about palm devices from 2010 or 2022.
A few of the apps live on in emulation on my Android via StyleTap. One is the best astronomy map app I've ever used, another a favorite game (from back before platforms like Google turned us into product and incentivized developers to fill their stores with so much low-quality ad-infested in-app-purchase garbage).
I held onto a few models over the years which I kept as backup devices (eg. Palm V, Treo, an Enfora Wifi sled) and local copies of all the software to make 'em work. Quite confident I could bring them back to life for posterity (though secretly wish I could bring them back to life as a daily driver).