Your First Handheld?

[Dave Britten]

(05-17-2014 01:27 PM)cutterjohn Wrote:  ...well since some people are adding PDAs, my first of those would have been a Palm IIIx, to which I added TRG's XTRA XTRA Pro upgrade(8MB RAM/4MB flash).

Used that for quite a few things, including as what you might call my first ebook reader, emergency serial terminal, had an onboard C compiler, onboard Pascal compiler as well amongst other things.

I still used that thing a fair bit until one day a few years I finally dropped it and cracked the right corner of the screen, but I did buy a replacement that was in fairly decent condition and swapped in the TRG upgrade. Planning on tracking down a replacement screen for mine as my original is practically mint especially compared to the replacement.

If anyone finds the original TRG XTRA XTRA Pro software utilities I'd really like to know as contacting the company that TRG became gets me *silence*...

(Those Palms were quite the beast, so much software and capabilities, color(& 4.0 fw) kind of ruined them though IMO... left my IIIx @ 3.3 fw.)

Yeah, I got a lot of mileage out of those old Palm handhelds back in the day. I think I started with a Palm Pilot Professional around high school, upgraded it with the board that essentially turned it into a Palm III, replaced it with a IIIx, upgraded THAT with a board that turned it into a IIIxe (8 MB), got a TRGPro (that CF slot was great), then eventually started dabbling in the Clie line and other stuff. The later models never really had the same elegant simplicity as the old ones.

I got a second-hand Palm m500 a few years back, and that one comes pretty close to the simple utility of the old models, but with lots of RAM and an SD slot. I mostly used it for running Pocket Quicken and whatnot.