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A Short Palm Pilot History
By Darrin Ngo
You may have noticed people nowadays who appear to be scribbling stuff on their mobile phones using what appears to be a ball point pen or with what appears to be a small magic marker. These persons aren't exactly doing what they appear to be doing, but are actually using their palm pilots, or personal digital assistants, navigating through the device's user interface using its touch screen feature, aided with the use of a stylus, which are basically the "quills" of such electronic devices.
Palm pilots are basically personal digital assistants, which stand as the electronic class of personal organizers, but come integrated with a number of features which boosts up its popularity as an electronic device. The term has somewhat become the vernacular term used in defining personal digital assistants, hailing from one of the most popular class of personal digital assistants ever to be introduced into the market. Here is a shot rundown on history.
In 1996, Ed Colligan, Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins made history by coming up with the Palm Pilot, which was the first generation of personal digital assistants to come from Palm. The team was originally set on developing a handwriting recognition software for use and operation of other devices, but came up with the instead. From here on, history goes on into the development of newer, more advanced classes of palm pilots, each boasting to be impressive
personal digital assistants.
From humble history, today palm pilots, or officially, personal digital assistants come in packed with features, making them multi-functional devices geared for the successful use and operation of users. At their most basic, personal digital assistants are items geared in handling a user's appointments and schedules, sort of an electronic organizer, or filofax, but aren't solely limited to such functions.
Certain models of palm pilots have made history by coming out integrated with digital cameras, making them digital cameras themselves, capable of taking pictures with no problems at all. Also, with rather large memory storage capacities, a number of palm pilots types have also made history by coming out with impressive storage capacities, enabling these items to become playback devices for various audio and video media files. The same impressive storage capacity also makes these palm pilots portable storage devices, which users could use in storing electronic data and such.
But palm pilots truly made history when models which could be used as portable workstations came out, defining them as portable productivity devices, enabling users to send and read emails, as well as author documents and notes.
With all features packed all in one package, it truly isn't a wonder why the is quite a popular item when talking about consumer electronics nowadays.
My background is in information technology. I have been particularly interested the palm pilot when it made its big debut in 2000.
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