The 1996 pocket organizer that taught a generation to write Graffiti, the personal digital assistant that dissolved into the smartphone it helped imagine.
Born
1996 CE
Died
2011 CE
Lived
15 years
Dead for
15 yrs
At its peak
Tens of millions of Palm OS devices sold by the early 2000s
Cause of death
Replaced
Replaced by
The smartphone (iPhone and Android)
The Obituary
The PalmPilot, launched by Palm as the Pilot 1000 in 1996 and selling about a million units in its first 18 months, made the personal digital assistant (PDA) a mainstream object. It held your calendar, contacts, to-do list, and memos in a slab that fit a shirt pocket, and you fed it text by drawing Graffiti strokes with a stylus. A cradle and the HotSync button kept it mirrored to a desktop PC. Palm OS spawned the Treo smartphones, but Palm misjudged the touchscreen era; the iPhone and Android made stylus organizers obsolete, and HP killed the last Palm devices in 2011.
Worth remembering
Users learned Graffiti, a simplified stroke alphabet, to write on the screen with a plastic stylus.
You synced it to a PC by dropping it into a cradle and pressing a single HotSync button.
Gallery
A Palm m125 PDA held in the hand, showing the touchscreenSiarhei Besarab · CC BY-SA 4.0Chart of Palm Graffiti handwriting-recognition strokes used for stylus inputIMeowbot · CC BY-SA 3.0
Sources
Palm released the Pilot 1000 in 1996; the line evolved into Palm OS PDAs Wikipedia
Palm's Treo and webOS devices were discontinued by HP in 2011 Wikipedia
The PalmPilot was the first widely popular handheld computer, selling about a million units in its first 18 months. Computer History Museum
The Palm Pilot established the PDA category with its Graffiti handwriting recognition before smartphones absorbed the function. Encyclopaedia Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.
Buried nearby — by shared fate or a neighbouring lifespan.
