History of The PalmPilot

Palm Computing was largely the creation and vision of one man, Jeff Hawkins. Palm first brought tablet computing to consumers in the form of PDAs (but was beaten by Apple and its scions). The later – and more momentous – goal was to bring consumers to PDAs through simple and very fast user interfaces. This second goal brought us the original Pilot and an entirely new form-factor that millions embraced.

It was only until the introduction of multimedia-rich smartphones that Palm stumbled, though it was one of the leading manufacturers.

Hawkins was the ideas guy at GRiD Systems, which had been founded in January 1979. GRiD had pioneered the concept of ruggedized laptops, the GRiD Compass (released April 1982), and object-oriented programming environments.

Hawkins, who avidly researched the brain before he arrived at GRiD (though he had no advanced degrees at this time), had developed theories about how the brain recognized text. He developed these ideas into his first pen-computing product, PalmPrint… read more >

Palm Computing Platform 1992 Vintage Men’s T-Shirt

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