cross-posted from: https://mamot.fr/users/thibaultamartin/statuses/113879452911907737
Palms were offline devices that only synced with your computer when put on a docking station.
You could read and reply to emails offline, book or cancel meetings, and sync with your computer later. The latest versions allowed you to snap pictures and listen to your music.
No servers running constantly. No data spilled everywhere. Days worth of battery on a single charge.
The future stole our cables, and it took our attention span and our privacy with it.
#privacy #offline #data
I had the Palm VII, which had a mobile data connection and an antenna you would flip up. I felt like a god. When i “upgraded” to the Compaq ipaq i felt that the world was my oyster!
Now i hate my phone.
they (or at least the later palm pilot) had a surprisingly robust system for recognizing handwriting! individual characters had to be single strokes, and you needed to write each one a buncha times to calibrate initially so it has something to compare against, but i remember it being notably faster to type with than other contemporaneous tiny keyboards.
I used to be an avid TealScript user, which allowed you to tweak recognition of individual characters and even create entirely new gestures. It was magnificent.
Went through a lot of Palm devices, from a Palm III to a V to a Tungsten T3 (the most elegantly designed device ever, perhaps save the Mac SE) and eventually a Treo 680. It was a sad day when the ecosystem shut down and I had to downgrade to an Android phone.
I still miss so many features of those older devices. In fact, I still keep a Palm V in my nightstand because of its comfortably backlog screen and flawless handwriting recognition for those midnight thoughts.
Got to put a carefully cut strip of scotch magic translucent tape over the stylus square for both protection and friction enhancing
Always practice safe graffiti
This guy palms
It really is too bad that commercial solutions for true privacy focused syncing and wireless backups will only get worse if they were ever good at all. I think of products like the Ring Doorbell where there’s no reason the doorbell itself can’t be it’s own local server. The only reason to tie you to a cloud is to implement monthly fees while also harvesting your data. The idea of an open standard where multiple devices could connect to any cloud service (self hosted Next Cloud or commercial solution etc) will likely disappear with the direction we’re going. It’s a sad time for tech and an even more sad time for society worldwide.
Smartphones are nothing more than gentrified PDAs…
Literally the first phones labeled “smartphones” were things like the Handspring Treo that ran PalmOS.
Smartphones are nothing more than gentrified PDAs…
Less any semblance of privacy? We can still have the impression we’ve some control over what it does but for how long?
My last PDA was a Palm Tungsten T5, liked it a lot ;)
Holy crap, I have the exact same model still somewhere in the basement. It was so incredibly cool at the time. I felt like I was living in the future. Until I got my first mobile that is. Carrying two gadgets was just too much.
Carrying two gadgets was just too much
Which is why the Treo was such a game-changing big deal
My t5 tungsten didnt have wifi, but there was bt and ir. and you could buy a wifi card.
They’re shockingly useful today as a tool to manage ADHD, since they have a buncha organizational software baked into the OS, with plenty of other productivity apps still available for download off of PalmDB, without the connectivity nor distractions of a modern smartphone. I’m using a Sony PEG-UX50, which uses PalmOS 5, has a built in keyboard, and expandable memory (in the form of Sony Memory Sticks, cause Sony was addicted to format wars at the time.)
Oh, I remember those sexy boyos!
It’s smaller than I was expecting, but in fairness modern smartphones are gigantic. It’s perfectly sized for comfortable usage of the keyboard, and is genuinely worth grabbing one if the interest and budget are there for it.
On a single charge? The Palm Pilot used 2xAAA batteries. You could use rechargeables, I suppose, but they would have been NiCads, not Lithiums, in the 90’s. More likely you were using disposables.
My Zire71 had a LiIon battery that did require charging.
I don’t recall for sure with all of them. Mine was 2 AAA, my boss had a rechargeable in 1999. I still have this one.
About 2005 I picked up a Treo, almost positive that one was lithium (it was a cell phone). Though it may have been NiCd.
Laptops were offline devices that only synced with any computer when put on a phone cable.
The good old days of screaming through the house not to pick the phone up, dialing in, downloading emails and usenet messages, cutting the connection and screaming the all clear through the house.
And everything was “federated”. You sent email to a local email server and it synced with other email servers. You connected to your chosen Usenet server and it synced with other Usenet servers. Same with IRC for chat. Very few things were centralised.
Same with IRC for chat.
Ah the chaos of netsplits, trivia bots and XDDC. Good fun.
The boss already had wifi. But it was a large external antenna and the speeds were terrible.
Yep, I had a B wireless setup in 1999. Poor performance, but I wasn’t tethered!
Whoa, that sounds interesting!
(I should have clarified that I meant like the first laptops, at the dawn of computer intraconnectivity)
The III had an IR sync as well, but you had to initiate it and it was line of sight with the IR port on your computer.
I had it working with my Rev. B iMac.
Man, I miss my Palm III. Left it in a jacket pocket too close to a wall heater. :(
My palm treo 650 was the most badass phone ever
Yep. While Android can do far more, the Treo keyboard kicked ass.
Sick ringtones too
http://onj3.andrelouis.com/phonetones/unzipped/Palm/Treo-650/
Ooh, midi tones!
Though the Treo could use MP3 for tones too. It could also play video files, I remember watching Mars Attacks on a flight. Ate the hell out of battery, but I always carried multiples.
It was truly the first viable smart phone. With a wifi SD card, I could browse the web (albeit with terrible speed and a pitiful browser, but better than other mobile devices at the time) and sync to my laptop over wifi.
I had an sd card with a horribly compressed version of the first season of aqua teen hunger force on mine. People were so jealous, probably (they weren’t)
I miss my Newton. :(
Those were cool! I inherited my pop’s old one when he upgraded.
Loved my Palm III. Simpler days.
I used to take notes on paper in graffiti cause it was kind of a pseudo shorthand.
deleted by creator
My handwriting went from perfect block lettering (engineer/draftsman) to unintelligible scrawl when I learnt graffiti.
I still try to use graffiti when I try to “type” on my AppleWatch.
There was a Graffiti keyboard for android but I don’t think it’s maintained anymore.
Yes, it was even perfectly official. Unfortunately, Android changed from under it and they never bother to update it so these days it will just fail to start.
Me too!
I tried using a Graffiti keyboard on Android, without a stylus it doesn’t make sense.
