Page 26 - The Ultimate Palm Robot

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Bots /The Ultimate Palm Robot/ Mukhar & Johnson / 222880-6 / Chapter 1

Chapter 1 Meeting the Palm Robot 9

a better PDA. Hawkins envisioned a pocket-size computer that would orga-
nize calendars and contacts, and perhaps let travelers retrieve email while on
the road.

Hawkins knew he’d have a tough time selling his device, so he decided to
convince himself before trying to convince investors. His device would be
roughly the size of a deck of cards—much smaller and lighter than the New-
ton—and would therefore fit in a shirt pocket. But would it be practical even
at that size? Would it be comfortable to carry around? Hawkins decided to
find out. Before a single piece of plastic was molded, before a single circuit
board was designed, the Palm Computing Pilot existed solely as a block
of wood.

Hawkins cut a piece of balsa wood to the size he’d envisioned for his
handheld device, put it in his shirt pocket, and left it there—for several
months. He even took it out from time to time and pretended to take notes,
just to see if the size and shape felt right. Though he quickly came to realize
that such a form factor made perfect sense, doors slammed whenever he
showed the “product” to potential investors. “The handheld market is dead,”
was the mantra at the time.

Fortunately, modem-maker U.S. Robotics liked the idea of the Pilot so
much that it bought Palm Computing outright. In March 1996, the company
unveiled the Pilot 1000, and the rest is history.

Flash forward seven years. The Pilot—which would go through a number
of name changes, first to PalmPilot and then just Palm—had become the fast-
est-growing computer platform in history, reaching the million-sold mark
faster than the IBM PC or Apple Macintosh. In the interim, U.S. Robotics had
been assimilated into networking giant 3Com, and Palm along with it. The
Palm line had grown to include a variety of models, and companies like
Handspring, IBM, and Sony had adopted the Palm operating system for their
own handheld devices. Recently, Palm announced that it had sold its 20 mil-
lionth PDA—not bad for a company that started out based on a little block
of wood.

And thus, the first Palm devices, the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000, were born.
These were followed by the PalmPilot Personal and Professional. Due to a dis-
pute with the Pilot company, models that followed the Professional were just
called Palms.

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