Last week, my Palm died. Well, not completely; the digitizer won’t recognize any input, but other than that it’s fine — where “fine” means essentially unusable, anyway. I ordered a new Zire 72 from Amazon to replace it.

That’s when I discovered something HORRIBLE.

THEY CHANGED GRAFFITI.

This is NOT okay. I know why they did it — Xerox lawsuit and all that rot
— but goddammit, I’ve been using Graffiti since it was a product you bought to make your original Newton usable, i.e. before the original Palm Pilots hit the market, which puts my initial mastery of the single-stroke alphabet at nearly a decade ago. I do NOT want to take the time to learn new, “more intuitive” penstrokes,
especially when “more intuitive” is code for “slower.”

Fortunately, I’m clearly not the only one in this position; if you, like me, are vexed by this development, do this:

The basic procedure is:

1. Acquire access to an Original Graffiti (OG?) handheld.
2. Use a tool like Filez to get access to the unseen ROM files.
3. Beam Graffiti Library.prc and Graffiti Library_enUS.prc to your new handheld.
4. Do a soft rest on the new handheld.

Bingo! Back to OG. A hard reset — i.e., back to factory virgin status — will restore the new machine to the new heretical Graffiti, but why would you
want to do that?