Happy Birthday, Palm Pilot

Gary Krakow Columnist • E-mail

It was nearly ten years ago that I first stepped foot into a new job at something called MSNBC.com. 

I had been a television news producer at WNBC-TV in New York and decided to make the leap and try a new field — the Internet. I brought with me a brand-new electronic gadget, one that I had described to my TV viewers a few weeks earlier.

If you’ve ever been in a newsroom you’ll know that journalists are a very inquisitive bunch — especially when it comes to brand new, cool-looking gadgets. One by one, people at my new job came over to my desk to ask what this little device was. I told them it was a Palm Pilot — an electronic organizer.  Most nodded their heads as if they understood.  Some did get it — but said they preferred their Filofax books.

In the ten years that followed Palm has sold nearly 30 million Pilots and their successors. Not just to journalists but to people from all walks of life, from gadget geeks to teenage girls, blue collar workers and white-collar executives.

The original Palm Pilot was announced in January and released in late March, 1996. It wasn’t the first electronic organizer to hit the market. I’m still trying to forget my Sharp Wizard, a model with the keys in alphabetical order instead of QWERTY. And the term PDA (personal digital assistant) was actually coined to describe the Apple Newton.

The Palms were different, however. They were well thought out, well designed and a huge hit.

Then and now
Those first units were unbelievably basic compared to what’s available today. The original Pilot sported just 128 kilobytes (yes, children, that's kilobytes) of memory along with a 16 MHz Motorola 68328 processor. It had a 160 x 160 pixel monochrome touch screen and ran on two AAA batteries.

Palm’s latest PDA/smart phone, the Treo 700, by comparison, has 128 megabytes of memory (60MB user accessible), a 312MHz Intel XScale processor and a 240 x 240 pixel 16-bit color screen, capable of producing more than 65,000 colors. Power comes from a removable, rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

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