Palm OS
More info
- Creator
- Palm
- Released
- Type
- Operating system
- Successor
- webOS
The OS that ran the handheld organisers of the 1990s — fast, frugal, and built for a stylus rather than a keyboard.
Palm OS arrived in 1996 on the Pilot organiser and came to define the PDA era. It was deliberately spartan: cooperative multitasking, one task at a time, and memory measured in hundreds of kilobytes. Text went in via Graffiti, a simplified stroke alphabet drawn with the stylus, and the HotSync button mirrored your calendar and contacts to a PC in one press.
Palm licensed the system out to Handspring and Sony, but split itself between hardware and software companies (PalmSource). When smartphones arrived, the ageing core couldn't keep up. Palm instead bet on its successor, webOS — a clean Linux restart — and Palm OS faded away around 2009.