Thread by @TubeTimeUS

today i dug up my first mobile computing device. i bought this over 20 years ago. i wonder if it still works... 📱

just gotta put in some AAA cells... definitely not Li-Ion!

oh yeah, it works! i wonder if i still remember the text entry scheme called Graffiti.

you see, they didn't have accurate handwriting recognition back in the day, so they made you learn a very particular style of handwriting that was simple enough that the device could recognize it.

here's the complete Graffiti alphabet. the tutorial program shows how you wrote the last letter in the panel on the lower left.

the Handspring Visor (which is what this is) has a funny plastic cover on the back. this was unique to the Handspring device--Palm did not have this option.

the plastic slides out revealing an expansion slot! i never bought one, but they made a cellular modem/phone that could plug in here. it was quite expensive, at $300 (and that was on top of the $100 you spent for the Visor itself!) bonus pic of late 90's translucent Visor... 😂

and by modem i literally mean an old-school dialup modem.

the only other wireless connectivity was this IrDA port which uses infrared light to communicate with other PalmOS devices.

to get new email and your calendar for the day, you had to put it in this dock and push the sync button. then it made a cute little chirp when it was done.

i paired my Visor up with this neat little device and used it quite a bit. what is it, you ask?

it's a fold out keyboard that plugs right into the Visor! i used this for taking notes in class.

it came with some fun software in ROM, like this world clock.

or this incredibly '90s calculator. at the time, these were called programs or applications. the term "apps" hadn't been used yet!

so the reason I brought out this old PDA device is that I found an old backup CD of mine.

it's this little program I wrote for assisting fencing 🤺referees. it keeps track of the score, the elapsed time, any yellow cards, and it even has a built-in coin toss!

looks like i started writing the program just about 20 years ago!

writing code on early PalmOS was fairly simple. pretty much every event came through the main event handler, and you'd use a big switch statement to figure out and process each event coming in.

the worst part of PalmOS was the power management; you could get an AppStop event at any time, and you would have to save your entire state to a prefs object, deallocate memory, and shut everything down. and then do the reverse on an AppStart event.

[insert ugly code joke]

these start/stop events happened all the time, like when you shut off the screen, for example. not fun.

naturally Android took this and made it worse, so Android apps deal with this sort of nonsense when you *change the screen orientation* 😑

so how big was my ScorePad program? only 6,114 bytes, including the images of the large numbers. my Handspring Visor had 2MB of memory, which was also used for storage!

like other PalmOS devices, programs and data were all stored in RAM. the Visor had a little supercapacitor inside to retain the contents of RAM while you swapped out the battery.

but if you ran the batteries all the way down and lost RAM, you could put it in the dock and sync, and then you'd only lose whatever you had changed after that last sync.

someone reminded me of the sickly green backlight. if you held down the power button, this horrible green backlight came on. i can't really do the color justice with this photo, but it's ugly. it also chewed through the battery really fast

here's the docking cradle. looks like i was hacking a serial port into it.

the circuitry in the cable is passive. it just connects the wires up to the docking connector.