In 1996, Palm computing manufactured the first generation personal digital assistant known as the Palm m130Pilot. Due to a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by Pilot Pen Corporation the name Palm Pilot was given to the second generation of PDA's in 1997 and from 1998 onwards, this virtually became the generic name of all handhelds. Interesting huh!



Now, the founders of Palm Computing, Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan who also are the original inventors of the pilot actually when they first set out wanted to produce handwriting software named Graffiti. Fortunately, for the world they changed their plans midway, and decided to get into hardware. Palm is known to have gained from the attempts of Apple Computer and Go Corporation to produce handheld devices.

I bet you didn't know that Palm Computing was initially a division of US Robotics and then later of 3Com. Now Jeff, Donna and Ed who initially founded Palm felt that the didn't have enough control over the Palm Product so as a result they left 3Com and founded Handspring in 1998.

Handspring became the first Palm OS licensee and then produced a replica of the Palm handhelds and called it the Handspring Visor which used slightly different software and had a hardware expansion slot.

Then in 2000 Palm Computing became a separate company, which was called Palm Incorporated. Then in 2003, Palm Incorporated split into PalmOne for selling hardware and PalmSource for selling software. Handspring merged with Palm to form PalmOne and in 2005 PalmOne acquired the full rights to the Palm name, which it had shared with PalmSource and changed its name back to Palm.

The earlier Palms used the popular DragonBall processors which were a Motorola 68000 derivative. But the more recent models use a type of ARM architecture. The Arm Architecture is a class of RISC microprocessors, which is widely used in embedded systems and mobile devices. It is usually referred to by the Intel Xscale brand name.

Handhelds from Palm are becoming more advanced and are merging with smart phones and they have the capacity to work as computer harddrives via USB cables. The Palm handheld Treo 650 which functions as a mobile phone and also provides SMS, email and instant messaging.

It was predicted that as handhelds with multiple functions like the Treo become cheaper and more advanced, the traditional PDA device will disappear. Cell phone manufacturers are already producing smart phones, which use interfaces similar to the Palm OS and at present the Palm OS is used by the Sony Clie?, TRG Pro and Handspring Visor, apart from the Palm handheld. Now wasn't that an interesting history on something you most likely use everyday.