News 

Although far from being the first personal digital assistant, the lightweight (by the standards of the time) device virtually single-handedly created a mass-market for handheld computing devices, to the extent that for a while the term Palm was the generic name for a PDA.

At the time of its introduction the only significant player in the market was Apple, which had introduced its first Newton Message Pad three years earlier. Indeed it was the then CEO of Apple, John Sculley, who in 1992 coined the phrase personal digital assistant, although Apple was far from the first company with such a device. Psion introduced its first Organizer in 1984 while arguably the first devices that could be described as PDAs were the programmable calculators of the 1970s.

Why the Pilot succeeded where the Newton did not could simply be attributed to price - undoubtedly a huge factor. The first Palm sold for $299 while $600 was closer to the going rate for a Message Pad. However the Pilot had one major advantage over the Apple device, ironically because of the Newton's revolutionary data structure.

In a Newton, data was stored in databases known

ADVERTISEMENT

as soups that were available to all programs: the calendar could take data from the address book; a notepad note could be converted into an address book entry and so forth.

However this made it very difficult to sync data with computers which used separate databases for each application, although in many other respects, especially handwriting recognition, the Newton was superior. However it remained a 'data island', despite Apple's best efforts, and was scrapped by returning CEO Steve Jobs in 1998.

The Pilot, on the other hand, happily swapped address book, calendar and other data with desktops. Syncing proved the 'killer app' for handheld computing, to the evident surprise of Palm's founders. The company sold one million Pilots in the first 18 months - an adoption rate faster than the original PC, Macintosh and, as Palm notes, even the microwave oven.

'The first Pilot organiser was such a runaway success, even we were a bit surprised,' said Ed Colligan, Palm co-founder and current chief executive officer. 'But in one of my first conversations with [fellow co-founder] Jeff Hawkins he convinced me that the future of personal computing - real personal computing - was going to be in these highly mobile devices. That's why he designed the Pilot.'

In later years laptops have largely eclipsed handhelds as the 'future of personal computing' while the Palm platform itself has been overtaken by Microsoft's Pocket PC and latterly RIM's BlackBerry. In fact, Palm now sells more Treo smartphones than it does PDAs. In its latest financial quarter the company shipped 564,000 Treos and 510,000 PDAs. A year ago the figures were 279,000 and 659,000 respectively. Ten years from now, rather than marking the anniversary of the Palm PDA, we may just look back on it as a historical curio.