Palm (PDA)

Palm handhelds were Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) that ran the Palm OS.

On 28 April 2010 it was announced that Hewlett-Packard would acquire Palm for around US$1.2 billion. Although HP kept the Palm brand initially, all new PDA devices announced at press announcement on February 9, 2011, were branded as HP devices, not as Palm devices. TCL Corporation announced in January 2015 that it had acquired Palm's intellectual property from HP at the end of 2014, announcing plans to restart the company with crowdfunding being a key element in the development of new Palm smartphones.

History

Initial development

Pilot was the name of the first generation of personal digital assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996 (by then a division of U.S. Robotics).

The inventors of the Pilot were Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan, who founded Palm Computing in 1992. The original purpose of this company was to create handwriting recognition software, named PalmPrint, and personal information management (PIM) software, named PalmOrganizer for the PEN/GEOS based Zoomer devices. Their research convinced them, however, they could create better hardware as well. Before starting development of the Pilot, Hawkins said he carried a block of wood, the size of the potential Pilot, in his pocket for a week. Palm was widely perceived to have benefited from the notable if ill-fated earlier attempts to create a popular handheld computing platform by Go Corporation, Tandy, and Apple Computer (Newton).

Palm

Palm or Palms may refer to:

Botany

Technology

Business

Arecaceae

The Arecaceae are a botanical family of perennial lianas, shrubs, and trees commonly known as palm trees. (Owing to historical usage, the family is alternatively called Palmae.) They are flowering plants, the only family in the monocot order Arecales. Roughly 200 genera with around 2600 species are currently known, most of them restricted to tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate climates. Most palms are distinguished by their large, compound, evergreen leaves arranged at the top of an unbranched stem. However, palms exhibit an enormous diversity in physical characteristics and inhabit nearly every type of habitat within their range, from rainforests to deserts.

Palms are among the best known and most extensively cultivated plant families. They have been important to humans throughout much of history. Many common products and foods are derived from palms, and palms are also widely used in landscaping, making them one of the most economically important plants. In many historical cultures, palms were symbols for such ideas as victory, peace, and fertility. For inhabitants of cooler climates today, palms symbolize the tropics and vacations.

Palm (unit)

The palm may be either one of two obsolete non-SI units of measurement of length.

In English usage the palm, or small palm, also called handbreadth or handsbreadth, was originally based on the breadth of a human hand without the thumb, and has origins in ancient Egypt. It is distinct from the hand, the breadth of the hand with the thumb, and from the fist, the height of a clenched fist. It is usually taken to be equal to four digits or fingers, or to three inches, which, following the adoption of the international inch in 1959, equals exactly 7.62 centimetres. It is today used only in the field of biblical exegesis, where opinions may vary as to its precise historic length.

In other areas, such as parts of continental Europe, the palm (French: palme, Italian: palmo) related to the length of the hand, and derived from the Roman great palm, the Latin: palmus major.

History

Ancient Egypt

On surviving Ancient Egyptian cubit-rods, the royal cubit is divided into seven palms of four digits each. Five digits are equal to a hand, with thumb; and six to a closed fist. The royal cubit measured approximately 525 mm, so the length of the ancient Egyptian palm was about 75 mm.