In the Palm of My Hand

by Bryon D Beilman

I was cleaning out some drawers and ran into my US Robotics Palm Pilot.  Yes, that's right a US Robotics Palm Pilot. It was before it was 3COM and before it was eventually spun out as Palm.  It was , at the time, a pretty impressive device, with the stylus you could write on it, take notes and try to organize your life. It came with a stylus and a cradle that attached to a serial port to sync it to the computer.  Having just read Steve Jobs biography and reading how he hated the stylus and thought there should be something better, I agree, but at the time it was pretty advanced.   I do remember trying to take notes in a meeting or make it my single source, and it never really worked out. Third party companies made docks that had portable keyboards that folded up, but those had their issues as well.

Having and EE background, I usually like to take these things apart before I dispose of them, so we can dissect it and look at some of the cool engineering involved.  The inside basically contains 3 key components.   The Processor board with the  Motorola DragonBall CPU, the memory module, which was a type of DRAM, which would lose it's brains when the battery died and the display and pen control.   Looking at the motherboard, it was mostly analog components (on the back are resistors, capacitors and a few discrete components. The front had the CPU, some controls, and the power control (along with a big gap for the two AA batteries). The Memory was in a ZIF socket.  The Display unit had the secret sauce because it had an area for display as well as for capturing the Stylus input.

Another interesting design element is the buttons and how they pressed on the micro switches on the motherboard. The buttons are all designed to fit over the rubber mold that then pressed down on the switches.  As I took this part, I felt that it was solid engineering  both in an electrical and mechanical engineering sense and it brought back quite a few memories about where I was working in Palo Alto at the time  for an AI software company.

Before I took this apart, I did look at E-Bay to make sure it was not worth a lot of money as a collector's item. It turns out that people do sell them, and I found one on E-Bay for $1.35, which is no where near the $199 I think I paid for it back in the 90's .   I have found that my iphone has been perhaps one of the best designed devices I have owned, however, the Palm Pilot reminds me of all the engineers and ideas that came before it that paved the way for the device I have today.