Found out my old Palm Pilot still works after 22 years

I was cleaning out my dad's old desk drawer last weekend and found his original Palm Pilot from 2002. I plugged it into my laptop with a serial to USB adapter I had lying around, and to my surprise the screen lit up. The batteries were still holding a charge after all these years, which I never expected. I managed to sync it and found his old contact list from when he was a real estate agent in Phoenix. There were notes about houses he sold back then, with prices like $120,000 for a three bedroom. It made me realize how much simpler tech was before smartphones took over. Has anyone else found an old PDA or gadget that still boots up after decades?

2 comments

2 Comments

mia_anderson1mo ago

$120,000 for a three bedroom house? That made me stop and stare at my screen for a solid minute. My cousin just bought a fixer upper in Phoenix last year and paid nearly ten times that amount for something that still needs a new roof. It really puts things into perspective when you see those old numbers sitting there in black and white like that. The fact that the Palm Pilot held its charge all those years is almost as surprising as the housing prices. I guess they built those things to last back then, before planned obsolescence became the norm.

lucas6329d ago

You're stuck on the sticker price, but that $120k was a year's salary for a lot of folks back then, not some crazy bargain. My dad made $28k in 1989 and that house payment still ate up a third of his take-home, same as your cousin's probably does now. And that Palm Pilot holding a charge isn't some golden age miracle, it's just a simple screen and a basic battery, way less power hungry than the phone in your pocket that dies by lunch. Planned obsolescence gets blamed for everything but people just expect one device to do fifty jobs now. The real shock is that everyone thinks the old days were cheap, but they forget wages, interest rates, and what a loaf of bread cost too.