The PalmPilot Turns 10

Over a decade ago--yes, I worked at PC World even then--a few of us met with a small company at that time best known for making palmtop software. It told us it had recently been acquired by a major modem manufacturer, and showed us a prototype of a handheld computer called Taxi. Taxi was surprisingly small, it looked exceptionally easy to use, and the price was right. In a way that almost never happens, we came out of the meeting agreeing that the device could be both a breakthrough and a blockbuster.

The company was Palm Computing, the modem manufacturer was USRobotics...and Taxi, which turned out to have a name with trademark issues, became the original Palm handheld, the Pilot. (It wasn't even called a "PalmPilot" then--and the name Pilot also turned out to be problematic from a trademark standpoint, which is how the devices eventually came to be known as just plain "Palm.")

Our instincts were right: The Palm, which sprung from the mind of Palm Computing founder Jeff Hawkins, really did change everything. Before it arrived, it wasn't clear that the PDA would ever catch on. Apple's Newton models were getting larger and more expensive. HP's OmniGo was inventive...and almost unusable. And the Psion 3 (of which I was a devotee) seemed destined to stay a cult item.

Anyhow, the first (Palm)Pilots shipped in March of 1996, and Palm is officially marking their tenth anniversary on Monday--which is why I'm doing this reminiscing here.

The Pilot 1000 and 5000 were indeed big hits, and they more or less determined the direction that handheld-computer design would go henceforth. (There's barely been a PDA, smartphone, or other type of pocketable computing device that doesn't reflect their influence--even the iPod does, especially in the way the synchronization software is at least as important as the hardware itself.)

Over the past decade, the Pilot gave way to the PalmPilot, which was replaced by the Palm, which was superceded by a Tungsten or two--and today, the company's flagship product is the Treo, a device whose original versions emerged from Handspring, a company founded by Palm Computing's founders after they left Palm over the technological equivalent of artistic differences. Palm-the-company has gone through multiple names and ownerships, and its operating-system division is now part of a Japanese company that's focused on building a Linux platform for cell phones. Most recently, Palm, Inc. released a device based on Windows Mobile, the latest version of the operating system the company has fought against for most of the last ten years.

In short, the devices and their maker have had more than their fair share of ups and downs, along with some miscues, wrong turns, and bad luck. But they're both still with us. (As is Ed Colligan, current president of Palm and one of the triumverate behind the company's original success, along with Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky.)

And if you had told me back in 1996 about the Treo (which, for less than the price of the original Pilot, gives you more computing horsepower than a 1996 PC, high-speed wireless data, voice capability that works in most of the world's countries, a camera, high-resolution color, a tiny keyboard that really works, a slot for gigabytes of expansion memory, and thousands of third-party programs for an array of applications) I might have believed you, but I still would have been amazed. (On the flipside, if you had told me that the Treo 650 would have well-publicized reliability problems and be prone to random reboots, like a tiny Windows machine, I would have been dejected; for years, Palm's products seemed to be bulletproof.)

So happy birthday, Taxi--er, I mean Pilot. Or PalmPilot, or Palm. Back in 1996, only a handful of geeks carried a pocketable computing device with them. Today, most of us do, in the form of a modern Web-enabled cell phone. You had a lot to do with that--and so when the history of personal technology is written, it'll remember you as one of the handful of devices that mattered most.

Actually, it's already being written, sometimes by us here at PC World--and we named the Pilot 1000 as the fourth greatest gadget of the last fifty years...