Dick Pountain /Idealog 327/ 04 Oct 2021 01:24
Sunday was a beautiful sunny October day so I took a walk on Hampstead Heath. The sky was covered in small white clouds, like a Simpsons intro, so I took a picture of it on my Moto g8 Power Lite phone, then set off through the thick woods between the Viaduct Pond and Kenwood. The thick undergrowth put me in mind of a favourite piece of music so I fired up Spotify and my Bluetooth headphones and listened to Janáček’s ‘On An Overgrown Path’ (what, ‘metropolitan elitist’, moi?) On my way back, near Highgate Pond I glimpsed a movement in the grass and found a pair of bright red crayfish disporting themselves on dry(ish) land. My acid-head days are far in the past and a passing dog-walker confirmed that they were real, so I took another picture.
On the 88 bus going home I Googled ‘heath crayfish’, to discover that they are another invasive species from the USA, the Red Swamp Crayfish, and they live in holes in damp ground. When I got home I looked at Google Photos on my Chromebook and the pictures were already there: downloaded them, fettled them a little in Snapseed and posted them to Facebook. The whole operation, from Heath to FB, had taken half-a-dozen button taps and involved no cables at all.
How very different from a decade ago when I was writing columns moaning about having to carry a pocket camera, a mobile phone and a PDA every day, and dreaming of a day when one device would do it all.
How very different from a decade ago when I was writing columns moaning about having to carry a pocket camera, a mobile phone and a PDA every day, and dreaming of a day when one device would do it all.
That thought sent me off to the drawer where my old pocket devices go to die, from which I pulled out all my Palm and Sony PDAs (leaving the Psion Organisers, 3s and 5s in there). There were two Palm Pilots, an original 5000 – given to me by the company at CeBiT 1996 when they first came out – and a cheapo m100 that I used for years having given away my Palm V. There also was the extraordinary folding portable keyboard. In a fit of nostalgia I popped in a couple of rechargeable AAA and both sprang back into life after 20 years of disuse.
I say life, but that’s an exaggeration as their sync cradles were nowhere to be seen, probably buried deep in my cable midden, and I no longer have anything on which to run Palm Desktop software or drivers, which won’t run on ChromeOS, Android or 64-bit Windows. And both were wholly empty of data, not having any non-volatile internal memory. The cute little Sony Clié SL10 did have a slot for a Memory Stick, but that was empty as I’d transferred its card to the Clié TJ27 I had stolen.
I searched online for signs of a revival cult of the sort you can find for, say the Sinclair Spectrum or Commodore 64, but there was absolutely nothing. That’s probably because the considerable success that Palm OS enjoyed for barely a decade was based, like Apple’s, on a ‘walled-garden’ of proprietary hardware and matching software – writing drivers for today’s hardware, and the lack of wireless protocols would make it a labour of lunacy rather than love. Unlike Apple, Palm never quite managed to breach the garden wall and run free onto the internet. It was very late integrating a camera and later still, fatally late, in integrating a mobile phone. I still have my Palm Treo 680 which I used happily for several years and does still work, but the sheer weight of Android eventually attracted me away, like everyone else.
This nostalgia fest has made me realise how much I’ve forgotten about the Palm and Sony PDAs but I swotted it all up from my online collection of Idealog back-issues on Google’sBlogger, by searching for ‘Clie’ and ‘Palm’ which pulled up a dozen columns with titles like ‘On The Road’, ‘In The Pocket’, ‘Twilight Of The PDA’, and ‘Mobile Mayhem’. Reminded me of the adventurous stuff I did on those primitive devices, like backing up my laptop to the Clié’s Memory Stick or writing whole columns in Documents To Go on a Pilot.
All gone, up into the cloud, replaced by a new phone and Google’s marvellous ecosystem (completely defanged of techie nonsense and so easy that any child can use it). But it’s also a rather brutal reminder of the extent to which Google’s ecosystem is now support and extension for my own gently dwindling memory powers. Incidentally, I started this column with that mention of the Simpsons who, whenever they construct a cheap episode from repeated excerpts, offer a tongue-in-cheek apology for doing ‘a clip show’. Well, I’m not going to, so there...
[You can admire Dick Pountain’s clouds and crawdads on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain/ ]
I say life, but that’s an exaggeration as their sync cradles were nowhere to be seen, probably buried deep in my cable midden, and I no longer have anything on which to run Palm Desktop software or drivers, which won’t run on ChromeOS, Android or 64-bit Windows. And both were wholly empty of data, not having any non-volatile internal memory. The cute little Sony Clié SL10 did have a slot for a Memory Stick, but that was empty as I’d transferred its card to the Clié TJ27 I had stolen.
I searched online for signs of a revival cult of the sort you can find for, say the Sinclair Spectrum or Commodore 64, but there was absolutely nothing. That’s probably because the considerable success that Palm OS enjoyed for barely a decade was based, like Apple’s, on a ‘walled-garden’ of proprietary hardware and matching software – writing drivers for today’s hardware, and the lack of wireless protocols would make it a labour of lunacy rather than love. Unlike Apple, Palm never quite managed to breach the garden wall and run free onto the internet. It was very late integrating a camera and later still, fatally late, in integrating a mobile phone. I still have my Palm Treo 680 which I used happily for several years and does still work, but the sheer weight of Android eventually attracted me away, like everyone else.
This nostalgia fest has made me realise how much I’ve forgotten about the Palm and Sony PDAs but I swotted it all up from my online collection of Idealog back-issues on Google’sBlogger, by searching for ‘Clie’ and ‘Palm’ which pulled up a dozen columns with titles like ‘On The Road’, ‘In The Pocket’, ‘Twilight Of The PDA’, and ‘Mobile Mayhem’. Reminded me of the adventurous stuff I did on those primitive devices, like backing up my laptop to the Clié’s Memory Stick or writing whole columns in Documents To Go on a Pilot.
All gone, up into the cloud, replaced by a new phone and Google’s marvellous ecosystem (completely defanged of techie nonsense and so easy that any child can use it). But it’s also a rather brutal reminder of the extent to which Google’s ecosystem is now support and extension for my own gently dwindling memory powers. Incidentally, I started this column with that mention of the Simpsons who, whenever they construct a cheap episode from repeated excerpts, offer a tongue-in-cheek apology for doing ‘a clip show’. Well, I’m not going to, so there...
[You can admire Dick Pountain’s clouds and crawdads on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain/ ]
