The Verge has a pretty epic feature on the history of Palm, Treo, and WebOS. Not many people know this but I started and ran the Houston Palm Users Group after getting a Handspring Visor in high school. PalmOS had apps, connectivity, handwriting input, infrared beaming…

9 thoughts on “Verge on Palm

  1. I won a Palm IIIe in a writing competition – my first mobile device of any kind. Flight attendants used to want to swap software with me via the IR port. Fun times. I still have it, and a fold-out keyboard, but my batteries (and backups) have long since died.

    Saw one in a computing museum this weekend. Sobering.

  2. Very cool! I was a big time Palm fan for a long time. Had an early pea green display palm with no backlight… I forget the model, then a Palm III I think, then a palm IIIc, I think it was the first colour one. Moved on through various other palms… then jumped on board with the Palm Pre when it came out. I really enjoyed a lot of what Palm offered!

  3. I miss WebOS 🙁 I wish HP would release it already.. open source as promised. It’s an absolutely beautiful Operating System for mobile devices but its just never had its day on proper hardware. Poor WebOS. Poor Palm.

  4. My gosh, I nearly forgot these devices existed!

    I remember enchanting my coworkers in about ’97 or ’98 during a boring keynote speech by checking our stock price with a Palm that I’d won in a raffle.

    I saw my first Palm in about ’96. I remember thinking it was the future. It was so clear that this was how we’d all want to do things.

  5. Before WordPress ever existed, I wrote AvantBlog to allow people to use the AvantGo “browser” on their Palm devices to post to Blogger.com. Looking back, it was so amazingly ghetto, AvantGo had a bizarre hybrid online/offline thing going on where it saved form submissions locally and then submitted them when you were online. All very weird 🙂

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