Taking a look at my old Palm IIIx – by Paul Lefebvre

Summary

We’ve been doing some cleaning and purging here at Chez Lefebvre and stumbled across a relic. While cleaning, my wife was going through a box of what she thought contained old folders and notebooks, but hidden inside an old Franklin Covey Planner (also a relic and popular in the 90s) was my original Palm IIIx! This particular planner actually had a slot inside to contain the Palm itself, which is why it got lost for so long!As I recall, I bought this Palm IIIx in September 1999 and I feel like it cost around $300 (about $575 in 2025). Looking it up, it seems the original retail price when it was introduced in early 1999 was $370. I really don’t recall where I purchased it, but Staples or Best Buy are likely candidates.This particular Palm is so old that it runs on AAA batteries. Thankfully I at least remembered to remove the batteries before it got stored, so there was nothing there to leak and damage it.I popped in new AAA batteries and it turned back on to its familiar stylus calibration screen. I take good care of my gear so this Palm IIIx is in excellent shape. It even still had the original flip cover with the Graffiti sticker on it!Speaking of Graffiti, it all came back to my pretty quickly as I played around with it. For those that are unaware, the Palm did have a touch screen, but it really only worked for simple taps. To input data into the palm you drew on the touch area at the bottom, which was not part of the screen.On the left side of the touch area you draw letters and on the right side you draw numbers. With Graffiti, you draw each character one at a time using single stroke of the stylus. For example, to input the letter “A” you draw an upside down “V”.It looks a little weird at first, but it super-easy to learn. And apparently hard to forget as I still remembered many of the Graffiti strokes almost immediately. A few tripped me up, but the handy cheat sheet on the cover proved helpful.This Palm runs at 16Mhz, has 4MB of RAM and a resolution of 160x1...