Palm
More info
- Creator
- Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, Ed Colligan
- Released
- 1992–2011
- Type
- Handheld maker
The company that made the handheld organiser an everyday object, then changed owners more often than operating systems.
Jeff Hawkins founded Palm Computing in 1992. After writing software for other people's failed handhelds, including the Graffiti handwriting alphabet, it decided to build its own. The money came from modem maker U.S. Robotics, which bought Palm in 1995, and the Pilot launched in 1996: small, cheap, synced at the press of a button. U.S. Robotics was itself bought by 3Com, which spun Palm off in 2000. On day one Palm was worth more than its parent.
By then the founders had left to start Handspring, which built the Treo smartphone and merged back into Palm in 2003. The modern webOS and the Palm Pre in 2009 arrived too late to take on the iPhone. HP bought Palm in 2010 and killed the hardware a little over a year later; webOS lives on in LG's televisions.