cross-posted from: https://mamot.fr/users/thibaultamartin/statuses/113879452911907737
Palms were offline devices that only synced with your computer when put on a docking station.
You could read and reply to emails offline, book or cancel meetings, and sync with your computer later. The latest versions allowed you to snap pictures and listen to your music.
No servers running constantly. No data spilled everywhere. Days worth of battery on a single charge.
The future stole our cables, and it took our attention span and our privacy with it.
#privacy #offline #data
Laptops were offline devices that only synced with any computer when put on a phone cable.
The boss already had wifi. But it was a large external antenna and the speeds were terrible.
Yep, I had a B wireless setup in 1999. Poor performance, but I wasn’t tethered!
The III had an IR sync as well, but you had to initiate it and it was line of sight with the IR port on your computer.
I had it working with my Rev. B iMac.
Man, I miss my Palm III. Left it in a jacket pocket too close to a wall heater. :(
If you pointed two of them at each other, you could play multiplayer games over IR. It was pretty janky.
Smartphones are nothing more than gentrified PDAs…
Literally the first phones labeled “smartphones” were things like the Handspring Treo that ran PalmOS.
On a single charge? The Palm Pilot used 2xAAA batteries. You could use rechargeables, I suppose, but they would have been NiCads, not Lithiums, in the 90’s. More likely you were using disposables.
Still a charge, just no re for tomorrow.
Also I’m pretty sure those things lasted a lot longer than a day.
