[spiffytech]

Through middle school and high school I lived on my Palm devices. I carried them to class, broke out the portable keyboard, and did all my notes and assignments on them, then spent the breaks between classes beaming Strategic Commander game turns between my friends.

My teachers loved that I did this, because when you printed out notes from the Memos app it put a big white-on-black header at the top of the page. So teachers put my assignments front-of-line in their paper stacks and treated them as dividers between assignments.

Working this way was great for my ADHD brain. My elementary school gave me an AlphaSmart, speculating that I performed poorly or acted out in class because I got bored in the time it took to handwrite a sentence. Using Palm devices worked great because I could capture more of what was in my brain, and could edit and reorder my scattered, disorganized thoughts.

Those devices were excellent for what they were. I like what modern devices can do, but Palm devices felt like an extension of myself in a way modern smartphones don't.