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by ASalazarMX 649 days ago
Wondering if I could run this on real hardware, I realized I have no idea what happened to my Palm LifeDrive when I changed to Blackberries. I miss that little chunky PDA. It was amazing for its time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeDrive

2 comments

I just came across my old Palm Tungsten E2 last week while doing some cleaning. If I can also find its charger, I'll report back on running it.
I've come across my box of Palms a few times and had limited success getting them going. Seems they don't like being in storage for almost two decades. Really loved my Palms back then.
I have both a PalmPilot Professional (with serial) and a Palm m500 (with USB), the latter is a lot easier to pocket, but the USB support is horrible in modern OS. I keep wanting to get back in to Palm dev. I even managed to get Pila to compile under macOS Catalina a few years ago.

I also have a stack of V-Tech Helio's, which is a PalmPilot clone. I don't remember why I ended up with 3 of them, but I got them to reflash the OS and never got around to it. Their whole OS source code is available online. The compiler is not easy to make to work these days though. DJGPP and I think 16bit.

The LifeDrive was such a weird Palm!

On one hand I hated it, for its infuriating loading times compared to its predecessors (due to the hard drive spinning up for ~every unexpected memory access of an OS designed for having everything in RAM/ROM and literally no concept of file/block based memory at first) and its relative bulk.

On the other hand: Four! Gigabytes! That could hold more than two full movies! It was also my first Palm having Wi-Fi, which was nice.

All in all, to me it was a symbol of Palm quickly losing touch with modern developments: For example Symbian was miles ahead from an OS point of view, even though usability was nothing compared to Palm OS, and then there was the iPhone and Android, of course.