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Palm OS — How does it look today?
The first Palm PDA was introduced in 1996 and it was a huge success. How did Palm OS really work? Let's test it and figure it out.
Before we begin, it can be useful to remember the technological level of that time. The typical mobile phone, available for the customers in 1994, was a Nokia 2110, which had a 236g weight, a 25mm thickness, and a small monochrome 96x96 screen:
Laptops were heavy and expensive, smartphones were not invented yet, and nobody was even thinking about iPhone or Android at least for the nearest 10 years. Thus, an appearance in 1996 of a Palm Pilot device, that was relatively cheap and lightweight, that could be held in a palm and could work as a personal digital assistant, was a huge step forward. These devices became really popular and were on the market for about 10 years.
From the tech perspective, it is also interesting to see how it works. Nowadays nobody will be surprised by having a smartphone with an octa-core CPU, 8GB of RAM and an AMOLED screen. On the contrary, the typical Palm OS device was having a single core 16MHz Motorola Dragonball processor, 2MB RAM and a grey-scale LCD with 160x160 resolution. There was even no Lithium battery inside, just two AA elements. How was it working? Let’s get started and figure it out.
Emulation
It is easy to test the Palm OS device using the emulator. It is free and can be downloaded from the https://palmdb.net/app/palm-emulator page. To start the device we also need a ROM file, and actually, this is all, we need for the start.
After selecting the ROM image and setting parameters, we are ready for testing:
