The Ephemera Archive is a new series where I explore the history and significance of forgotten objects.
It’s 1996. Steve Jobs still has plenty of hair and his Glossier model daughter has yet to be conceived, never mind born. Instead of assuming PDA stood for Public Display of Affection, you might assume it means Personal Digital Assistant, and a new competitor for the MessagePad, Apple’s PDA, has emerged.
The PalmPilot wasn’t an immediate success and few in the industry expected it to amount to anything at all. PDAs had been around since the 80s but they were always too clunky to draw much attention. By today’s standards, the PalmPilot and its eventual early aughts copycats do seem plenty clunky, but to certain professionals at the time they symbolized modern simplicity and a relatively accurate vision of the future.
“I am convinced that there are countless uses for digital technology that no one has even imagined… Will each of us have a palm pilot or similarly handy device to plug into cyberspace via satellite and instantly retrieve any and all human information? Perhaps. For now we will remain in the analog present.”
—Jan-Christopher Horak, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists Vol. 3, No 1 (2003)
There’s a certain smug joyfulness in poring over old tech writing. I can’t help but derive a modicum of joy from the innocence of early aughts headlines: “Turn your Palm Pilot into a digital audio player” and “New Palm Pilot Links to Internet Wirelessly.”
The marketing of the industry depends on a bright image of what tech can be that doesn’t involve Facebook helping Trump win an election, personal photo leaks, or any of the other offenses that have been brought on by the increasingly intense attachment between our personal lives and tech. Looking at these ads, articles, and the PalmPilot itself can provide a glimpse to a time when connecting one’s life to technology was something that companies still had to actively sell consumers on.
Perhaps the greatest indicator of the PalmPilot’s success is the ubiquity of its name. The PalmPilot1000 and -5000 were two specific models of the PDAs, the “Pilot” had to be dropped from all further models in ‘98 following a lawsuit with the Pilot Pen Corporation. Yet the name stuck and it was early that we shucked the term “PDA” in favor of “palm pilot,” regardless of developer. Just look above at the earlier 2003 Horak quote which used the term without any capitalization of the brand name.
As a kid, I had a bit of a thing for performing adulthood. I carried around a purse every day and my parents would find any number of their things inside of it: keys, flip phones. Searching through images of palm pilots of various makes, I attempt to find the one my father bought for my mom when I was 5 or 6. She didn’t care for it, but I certainly did. It was the perfect object for pretend professionalism. I spent hours tapping around with its stylus, as if the act of clicking would manifest the appointments and deadlines that would necessitate owning such a device.
The PalmPilot remains a cultural artifact of a pre-smartphone era, a necessary bridge from flip phone to smart. The gadget is a relic of a time when we didn’t expect so much from our electronics and our personal lives weren’t so dependent on the electronic. Yet, at the time it seemed excessive to many. After all, it retailed for $399 in ‘97 — a true indulgence considering even its creators admit that its number one competitor was pen and paper.