[rythie]

Palm was the market leader, it would have been the obvious choice. Palm had been around since 1996 and by 1998 had sold 30 million devices [1]. PocketPC didn’t come out until 2000, in 2001 they had only sold 1.25 million devices, equating to less than 10% market share [2]. From what I remember Palm Pilots were the go to choice for PDAs, they were simple and worked. Other devices had come and gone. It would have been odd if they chosen something else. I doubt anyone was thinking it would be used for 20 years, though I don’t think people would have thought it would go away at the time.

[1] https://history-computer.com/palm-pilot-guide/ [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pocket-pc-sales-1-million-and-...

[johnwalkr]

I was thinking it’s not actually an obvious choice for controlling hardware. It was either an interesting choice that was small and didn’t need a lot of components, compared to the obvious PLC. Or it seemed like an obvious choice to someone that didn’t know better.[1] Either way, someone probably made a good decision to keep the old system maintainable by emulating the palm pilot instead of replacing it.

Mind you, it’s not clear how much of the control is done by the palm pilot. For all I know, it’s not much more than a screen connected to a PLC. But my gut feeling is it’s actually doing at least some of the control to be worth emulating and keeping the original software.

[1]You see this a ton now, with people reinventing the wheel using arduino, raspberry pi and spark fun parts to automate something in the small business they are employed at. Because they know these things as hobbyists, but they and anyone around were never exposed to PLCs. Soon after they leave, a newer employee will rebuild from scratch, maybe using ESP32. Overall the lifetime cost is probably much higher. Meanwhile a PLC from 1990 is fairly easy to maintain, repair or replace (including porting the software).

[londons_explore]

You just said with a straight face that the lifetime cost of a PLC was below that of an Arduino...

Arduino cost = $10 for hardware, and a few hours of amateur coding, and an expectation of a 25 year lifespan as long as no changes are needed.

PLC cost is $15k for the hardware, and $10k to hire an expert to code it, who probably forces you into a $10k/year maintenance contract.

[sillywalk]

I was also curious how much control it has, or if it's sort of a front-end to a PLC or microcontroller.

[ericcumbee]

That device specifically was cheap and readily available. If it failed you could have gone to any OfficeMax or Circuit City and picked up a replacement.

[kristopolous]

I assume at least one engineer aggressively argued for DB9 serial along with a Windows and Mac app instead and lost.

It was clear that the longevity of the installations would far outstrip the longevity of the Palm pilot

If I was in the room I'd even argue for DOS. As a target it had stopped moving, was ubiquitous, not going anywhere and is in enough important places that it would even survive the demise of Microsoft if they were to collapse in the future

[zgluck]

Did you you ever attempt programming anything under PalmOs back then? It was quite fragile because of the extremely low amount of memory on board, which forced the use of relocatable memory handles, a bit like classic mac OS.

https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~michalj/palmos/Memory.html

PalmOS and it's extreme focus on low end hardware was a super weird choice at the time. The one reason for using PalmOS was extreme battery life, which obviously was not a factor here.

There existed plenty better alternatives at the time.

[TheNewsIsHere]

I am not necessarily disagreeing with you.

I had a Z22 toward the end of the Palm era; back when LifeDrive was on their higher end and webOS seemed to be where the future might end up.

I loved that thing. I read tons of books on it.