5 Jul
2012
5 Jul
'12
11:50 a.m.
On 07/05/2012 02:41 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Others have pointed out the ease of syncing, but writing apps for the
PalmOS was much more straightforward than the Newton. ARM was a less
familiar architecture those days, NewtonOS was a bit esoteric in some
respects, and above all else the Palm Pilot *was smaller* so more people
were likely to have it with them.
PalmOS was a lot like MacOS, had the familiar 68K processor backing it,
and didn't try to do "too much." As is usual, worse is better.
Well said. This is the best explanation for PalmOS' dominance that
I've seen. It all makes sense.
I really should pick up one of the 68K-based Palm Pilots for some
hacking. I heard (ages ago) that it's pretty trivial to get different
code running on them. At that point it's just a 68K with a nice
bitmapped display; have cross compiler, will travel.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
The whole thing seemed a bit clunky and slow and not
very useful to
me. I think they did coin the acronym PDA... and it did lead on to
bigger and better things. (like the Ipad).
I wouldn't say no to one if someone gave me one for my collection. (;
Why was the Palm Pilot more successful than the newton?