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PalmOS on Raspberry Pi
- lallysingh 5y agoThis looks, AFAICT, like a wine-style compat layer: https://pmig96.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/reviving-palmos/ https://pmig96.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/reviving-palmos/ "The application “thinks” it is running on a PalmOS device, but instead it is running natively on Linux."
- numpad0 5y agoWait, this isn’t a copyrighted Palm ROM running on an emulator!?
- rafael_c 5y agoPalm... I just remember, as a 12-year old, being fascinated by my older cousin's Palm Pilot Professional. The thought that you could have a tiny computer in your pocket, with all sorts of programs, read articles and books, play games... Two years later I would buy my beautiful Palm Vx, while staying in Montana as a foreign exchange student (and be made fun of because of it by my farmer American father hahah). I actually though Graffitti was extremely intuitive and I was able to write faster on the palm device than with a pen on paper. I think I read five or six books on that tiny screen as well - and I thought it was great. Different times.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoThey were great devices. Functional, and well made. It's a shame how managment ran that company into the ground.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xattt 5y agoMy handwriting changed after getting used to Grafitti. I still mark Xs on forms with the symbol for X (like the K, but mirrored). This is over two decades after the fact.
- pomian 5y agoTo this day, trying to hand write an e when printing quickly? Your hand still does a double joined c. And a T is written like a 7. It's amazing how the muscle memory stays with you. It was so simple to learn, and stayed with you. Swype is the first phone writing technique, that has beaten Palm.
- mdp2021 5y ago> It's amazing how the muscle memory stays with you It is because it made sense. Not just a convention, the graffiti gestures are a convincing set of compressed (minimal full information, simplest one line per character) glyphs.
- discordance 5y agoIt was your older cousins palm pilot hip holster fashion statement that amazed me
- hellbannedguy 5y agoThis brings back memories. One--how much I liked my TX. (One of the first little devises you could get on the internet with. I was a Goodguy's Liquidation sale. They had 500 Halo 2 Collector's editions for $5.00/piece. I needed the price on ebay. Everyone had a dumb phone. I went to a closed public library, and logged on with no password. I saw a high of 50 bucks. Went back and bought them all. I thought I had a upper hand in pricing stuff at auctions, etc. A year later, and it seemed like everyone had a smart phone. two--dissapointment over how this company was mismanaged to the ground.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago"This brings back memories." Yeah I can remember seeing this yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-09-09 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-09-09
- mysterydip 5y ago> two--dissapointment over how this company was mismanaged to the ground. pardon the pun, but they had the mobile market in the palm of their hand. They could have exploded as a smartphone provider had they evolved. Instead they faded to nothing. So frustrating.
- numpad0 5y agoThey did a superb job with Palm Pre/webOS, they did. Only they then gathered people to watch it live a painful death suffocating in Sprint exclusivity. It was like having delivered regular updates about a random person with terminal cancer. To this day I still don't understand why the public had to watch graphic death scenes of Palm and RIM each going down.
- vlovich123 5y agoMy observation was that sprint hampered our growth (maybe) but chasing Verizon killed us. It was a terribly negotiated deal. Verizon kept upping the purchase order and forcing us to have the inventory on hand only for the demand to never materialize. This caused the liquidity crunch and eventual sale to HP. At least, that’s my understanding of the story but I was a low IC new grad at that point.
- grognak420 5y agoRead this as WebOS for a moment and got excited then realized it was PalmOS
- akoncius 5y agopalmOS and nokia n9 are the most promising and the most failed projects in the last decade i think. it had so much potential but failed miserably.. I would really want to live in alternate reality where these two projects are successful :(
- WoodenChair 5y ago> palmOS and nokia n9 are the most promising and the most failed projects in the last decade i think. Palm OS came out 25 years ago.
- Infernal 5y agoMaybe thinking of Palm webOS (I had a Pre in 2009, it was way ahead of its time)
- frosted-flakes 5y agoThat and RIM's BlackBerry OS 10. It was fantastic and remarkably consistent across the board, even third-party apps like WhatsApp. Android's and iOS's swipe-up-to-go-home feature may have originated in BB10, but BB10 did it way better.
- akoncius 5y agoyes, was talking about webOS and palm Pre devices
- Infernal 5y agoThe first time I SSH'ed into my Pre and saw it was basically just another RedHat-based Linux was /so cool/. I thought for sure it was the future of mobile operating systems.
- cecida 5y agoI love this sort of home-brew computing. There's so much to be pessimistic about when it comes to the beast we've unleashed, but hackers mucking around with a Raspberry PI isn't one of them.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoI worked on the original PalmOS. This is TREAT to see. thank you thank you for making my month!
- buzzert 5y agoPalmOS was a HUGE part of my childhood (I begged my parents to buy me the first edition Handspring Visor). Thanks for your work!
- LegitShady 5y agoI used my palm for book reading waaaaaaaay before ebook readers or even cheap tablets were a thing. I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of hours I spent on it but its a significant number. It's still around here somewhere, and worked when I last tried it.
- Causality1 5y agoOh yeah, especially with the eReader app and desktop software. Drop whatever ebook you want into it and get it converted to PDB. The default palmos font was incredibly easy on the eyes too.
- mdp2021 5y agoAnd no problem using it under strong sunlight (models with transflective TFT LCD).
- Tor3 5y ago
- dlhavema 5y ago20 years ago i built a functional wireless waiter system (edit: using palm pilots + j2me) like you see at applebees/chillis today. I had no business sense to figure out how to sell the thing. I also was a young 20 something year old...
- giantg2 5y agoOff topic, but PalmOS sounds like an OS for porn.
- seanvk 5y agoAt Garmin, we ran PalmOS as a process on top of our RTOS. Fun times.
- dmitrygr 5y agoany chance i could ask you some more Qs about that? (me@dmitry.gr)
- phoenix3200 5y agoDid you write apps for PalmOS? I think I might have cracked them when I was less mature...
- dcreemer 5y agoI worked on that project from the Palm side. Visited Olathe a couple times too. That was one of the more fun integrations.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoWell, that was pretty standard for PalmOS. m68k PalmOS ran on top of AMX, which was also technically an RTOS...
- bsharitt 5y agoI had always been super fascinated by Palm pilots since I was a kid and I finally got my hands on a Palm Zire 31 as an adult and later one of my first(maybe my first) smartphone was a Palm Treo 755p. Sure PalmOS had its shortcomings(especially by the time I got my hands on it), but I still have fond memories of my PalmOS devices. In fact the major impetus for replacing my Treo wasn't the OS, but the lack of onboard WiFi or GPS, especially has Google Maps came on to the scene.
- electrona 5y agoDoes anyone remember a game with a frictionless, slimey blue guy sliding through puzzles?
- moron4hire 5y agoI had a couple of PalmOS devices back 20 years ago. I think my last one was a Sony CLIÉ. WiFi, this newfangled thing called Bluetooth that I could use to transfer files to the Nobody Else I Knew Who Had Bluetooth, digital camera (it wasn't too bad for the time), MP3 player, and a Memory Stick Pro slot for removable storage for all those MP3s and pictures. It had this beautifully tactile selector dial on the side. You could roll it with your thumb to move menu selections up and down, then press it in to click. Oh, it was so good. I switched to PocketPC/Windows Mobile shortly after that, though. Dell Axim, IIRC. The screens were nicer. They had CF card slots for removable storage and peripheral devices. The WiFi wasn't as flaky and it even had a basic 3D graphics accelerator. I could program for it in C#, and it was very easy, no more difficult than programming on desktop. Actually, I experimented for a while with writing apps that ran on both desktop Windows and Windows Mobile and it was quite a fascinating experience. That was a problem with PalmOS. If you wanted to develop for them, you either got stuck using J2ME (which was hot garbage), or you had to pay to get access to a C compiler. PocketPC and .NET Micro Framework were significantly much lower barrier to entry. Completely unlike trying to figure out Android development today. I think that's why I never really bothered to learn Android development. I've never really had an impetus to push me to chug through the learning curve, plus I already knew it didn't have to be that stupid. I've rathered stick to webdev and make whatever I need as mobile responsive PWAs. I look at my smartphone today and it has never felt as good as that CLIÉ or Axim.
- Steven-Clarke 5y agogood times, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_V -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
- rjsw 5y agoI think your PalmOS experience must have been from a specific time period. The earliest PalmOS systems had gcc, don't remember there being any commercial tools, this was before Java had been released.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
- caseyf7 5y agoWow, this just inspired me to pull my old Palm IIIe out from the drawer. My first thought was it was hopeless because the battery is probably dead and no one still makes that battery. But I was wrong, it refreshingly uses two AAA batteries. I put them in and it turned on and seems to be working great! My old iPhones will probably never boot up again.
- mnahkies 5y agoI tried to get my zire 71 working a while back but sadly it wouldn't come to life, presume the battery gave out. It was a wonderful piece of technology though, especially in the pre smart phone days
- zyamada 5y agoI don't know much about electronics or iPhone hardware. Does anyone know if it would be possible to get old devices with dead batteries to boot when connected to a proper power supply? I don't mean a cell phone charger, but connecting the positive and ground (and whatever else?) from a bench power supply to the appropriate solder points on the phones mainboard itself?
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoI don't think you can just pretend your PSU is a battery, since real battery has a data connection to give it health and charge information, although I have no idea how hard it would be to just mimic that interface
- techrat 5y agoalmost all apple idevices will not run plugged in if the battery is dead. thought I could do this on an old click wheel iPod but nope, had to replace the battery before i could use it. it did not use to be common, i had no issues keeping other devices like my xperia play powered on when removing the battery, but that is also a device where the battery is meant to be user replaceable.
- wtallis 5y ago
- EamonnMR 5y agoA Palm Zaire 31 was the first mobile device I owned. I could type on it with an external keyboard, which was awesome. You could stick an SD card full of music in and use it as an MP3 player or stick a card full of Atari 2600 games in and play. So I kinda got to play with the mobile future a bit early. But the touchscreen was squishy and you had to type with a stylus. They really pushed the glyph recognition but it never worked very well for me.
- phendrenad2 5y agoSo PalmOS isn't open-source. This is some kind of emulator or reimplementation. It's sad how much source code is rotting in a vault somewhere, long past the point where it's useful to anyone but hobbyists.
- zoom6628 5y ago100% win for coolness. Palm were great machines and great software. Now a lot all this into a case with a good battery and it’s Palm resurrected:-) Palm was influential on me as was Symbian on Psion for how things could be. I loved the pre-touch Blackberry devices. For business communication these devices simpler easier and (from memory) more robust than what we use today. Entertaining? No. Dull? Yes. Efficient and productive? Hell yeah!
- pomian 5y agoAlso had one of the best contact apps. Transferable - syncable with all operating systems. And easy to back up.
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoMy father still uses the Palm contacts software on Windows, i.e. the software that your Palm service synced _to_. He doesn't use the Palm itself anymore though.
- pomian 5y agoSame. Don't use the palm. But keep adding to contacts. I found a an easy app to convert Palm contacts to Android. It works. But all that issues with Google! So computer is still back up still works in Windows 10.
- etaioinshrdlu 5y agoThe palm used an arm processor, right? Is there any chance that user-space applications wouldn't need emulation (just system call hooking)? Or is the ARM in the Pi just too radically different to be helpful?
- andrewshadura 5y agoThey used 68K until some point, when they switched to Arm and wrote a translation layer to allow running 68K apps on Arm.
- calgoo 5y agoI wonder if this would work on the PinePhone… could actually be really cool to resurrect the OS on a mobile device and use the Palm/Pumpkin UI.
- CTOSian 5y agoI bet using a RPI0w will transform this to a more portable PalmOS device.