My PDA at 20
Personal digital assistant, that is.
This year my PDA turns 20. It may sound like a lot, but this year the stereo I use at this very moment turns 30. Old digital equipment tends to last longer; standards have been lowered over the decades in order to lower sale prices. Real savings? Nope, you just buy the same stuff over and over again. The true cost is elusive. Today's electric kettles barely outlive the warranty or just slightly exceed it (so you cannot return them when they break and repair is expensive if not practically impossible; "smart" means not modular and radically too complex).
This PDA was made 20 years ago, but it was not used for 20 years. Actually, I must confess it is a bit of a 'replica' because the Palm Tungsten from 2004, while it's still here and worked the last time I tried it, is no longer in use. For a very low price I got an identical one from eBay 12 years ago*.
Does the current one still work? You bet! Is it on my desk and charging? Definitely.
But...
Is that Free software? No.
Back in the days Palm spoke about moving to Linux, but then Microsoft crept in and contributed to the company's downfall. HP and LG did not save webOS and it never quite regain its simplicity.
I started using a Palm PDA in 2001. My aunt in the US bought it for me, as she said it would be helpful to me. She knew I liked lean and mean things (I did some technical work for her) and these things didn't cost much anyway. 20 years ago they had modest GNU/Linux support and several graphical front ends, including jpilot (I tried many others over the years, but jpilot maintained support for many more years).
Does jpilot still work?
Not anymore, as per Debian 11:
# apt search jpilot Sorting... Done Full Text Search... Done
In older distros jpilot did exist (pre-packaged), but I could no longer synchronise to/from it.
Each year more and more Palm- or Pilot-related libraries/software get removed/deprecated. There's some decent stuff left, e.g.
libpalm-pdb-perl/oldstable 1.400-1.1 all modules to parse Palm database files
imgvtopgm/oldstable 2.0-9+b2 amd64 PalmPilot/III Image Conversion utility
libpalm-perl/oldstable 1:1.400-1.1 all modules for manipulating pdb and prc database files
txt2pdbdoc/oldstable 1.4.4-8+b1 amd64 convert plain text files to Palm DOC (for PalmOS) and back
In Geminispace and Gopherholes you occasionally find people blogging (or Gem-logging) about some old Palm Pilot they find in a drawer. Some can still be made/adapted to work. It's a nostalgic item and in order to pull data out of it one must nowadays rely on external SD cards and various utilities. The "Sync" applications barely exist anymore (unmaintained or not compatible with "modern" USB ports), getting additional software is hard (more so installing it), and forget about IR, Bluetooth etc.
For now, in my case at least, PalmOS is not entirely obsolete. Not secure you say? Wait, you realise this thing cannot be connected to the Web, right? Wi-Fi?? Are you nuts???
One day it will find a resting place. Until then it'll spend years sucking in electricity and helping with some memos, voice memos, addresses and so on. It's a digital pocketbook with some games, dictionary etc.
I've not kept up with the licensing of WebOS (or even PalmOS), but it's probably openwashing at best. Computing has gotten a lot worse and more bloated since the Palm days. Today's computing is highly corrosive both to people and to the planet.
Don't call it "retro" or "nostalgia". In a lot of cases, it may be common sense. Or yearning for better days. █
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* I originally bought it for my wife to use, but after trying some recipes on it she found that paper notes or books worked better and passed the PDA to me (to replace the old one, already in worse condition anyway, more so after hundreds of hard falls)