It was just a wee lie that Jeff Hawkins told over a decade ago.

But if he hadn’t done that, there might never have been a Palm Pilot, nobody today would be carrying a Treo 650 smartphone, and the whole development of handheld computing might have been set back by years.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Pilot — the first successful handheld computer. Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky were the main characters at Palm Computing in the 1990s — Hawkins, the brainy inventor; Dubinsky, the no-nonsense businesswoman.

They are on the phone from Silicon Valley, talking first about the general malaise in handheld computing in 1996. There had been so much promise, hope and hype in the early 1990s. AT&T had tried with the EO. General Magic came out with a book-sized gadget. Casio had the Zoomer. And then Apple blew the hype to nuclear proportions with its Newton — a historic gaffe that ranks as worse than IBM’s PCjr but not quite as bad as Motorola’s Iridium satellite phone.

Via USAToday

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