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title: Supporting Palm Devices in the Early Aughts
date: 2024-10-28
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Educational Computing at UCSD
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When I first had the inkling to get a Palm Pilot in 2024, it
brought back memories of my first experiences with Palm in the
early aughts.
After moving to San Diego from the Midwest in 2004, one of my first
jobs was working for the University of California San Diego as
a systems administrator for Educational Computing at the School of
Medicine. The job was great from an experience perspective as I was
able to work on a variety of Linux, Sun, SGI, Netware, Windows and
Macintosh systems while supporting a variety of departments.
UCSD Educational Computing
A highlight was the SGI workstations that students could use to
dissect things using "virtual reality". Having seeing these systems
movies like Jurassic Park made supporting them a lot of fun and
gave me my first experience with Irix.
UCSD Atomic VisualizeR
The Professional Development Center (PDC) was one of these
departments, and the head of it (a woman named Peggy) insisted on
using Macs and completely relied on Palm Tungsten (I think it was
an E2). I would frequently go to her office and help her with any
issues she had, usually related to hotsyncing her calendar and
email to her device. This was more of a challenge since the
insistence of using Macs meant using Palm Desktop for Mac which had
it's own set of quirks.
Eventually I had my own hotsync cradle at my own desk, so I could
troubleshoot her device without having to go to her office, but
because my system was Windows XP it wasn't 100% the same as using
her Mac. I don't recall specifics, but I do remember being
frustrated with the inconsistencies of hotsyncing and the frequent
ways it would break.
Around the same time cell phones were improving to the point where
everything could be done OTA (over-the-air) and hotsyncing became
obsolete as "push" technology of keeping a device always in-sync
with a server started taking over. I remember setting up some
Windows CE based device (maybe an iPaq?) and connecting it directly
to our Exchange server over the newly deployed campus wifi. It was
amazing to me at the time how it all just "worked" and signaled the
future of mobile devices.
While at the time supporting Peggy and her Tungsten wasn't exactly
exciting, I'm glad I had the experience of working with the device
at a time when it really was revolutionary and before it was
completely obsoleted by our modern smartphone paradigm.
It also gives a good contrast of using a Palm device today compared
to back then. Even though the original Palm Desktop and devices are
woefully out-of-date, there is an impressive amount of information
and people still using these devices. The fact that people are
still making Palm apps and tools in 2024 is a testament to the
original promises of these devices and shows that even though they
are old they still have a lot of life still left in them.
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