We Heathen are gadget people. No surprise there; we have a blog, for crying out loud. It should therefore come as no surprise that we have, over the years, had a metric shitload of personal digital devices into which we twiddled or scribbled or download the personal, trivial equivalent of the Library of Congress over the years. (Yes, we even had a Newton. Three, in fact. Two of them we still have; the third we traded for some massages several years ago. No, we are not making this up.)

What finally pulled us away from the Newton — which, despite its awful debut, finished life as a spectacular and useful device we’ve still not seen the equal of — was a combination of factors:

• Steve Jobs came back to Apple and killed the Newt because it was a John Sculley project, and he hated Sculley; nobody wants to use an orphan. (Newton geeks, do not bother me with the no-doubt still “vibrant” online community of die-hard Newton afficianados who make the Comic Book Guy look suave and urbane. We do not care.)
• The Newton, great as it was, had moved in the opposite direction of the market — instead of small, syncable, and cheap, it got bigger, more expensive, and ditched desktop sync. The latter was a serious, serious flaw — backup is one thing, but desktop access to personal data is key.
• The rise of the Pilot, which was all the things the Newt wasn’t — i.e., small, syncable, and cheap.

We first used a Palm between our last two Newts in about 1997. Now, 8 years later, we stil use one. This article is a great summary of the history and development of the platform, including its origins with GRiD and Tandy (!) before Palm became its own firm, under the care of US Robotics. (We really wish we still had the first Pilot we used, with THAT logo in it, before 3Com bought ’em.)

(Local PDF copy, in case that one goes away.)