My Palm III still lives!
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I have boxes of old computer shit in my basement. Stuff that I have dragged with me through life like a packrat, as though some day it might come back in style.
The only good thing about my boxes of obsolete computing crap is that sometimes I can find a rare power supply, adapter or cable that I need.

Last weekend I came across my old Palm III from probably 1998 or so. It's at least 20 years old.  Thankfully the designers had the intelligence to let it run on AAA batteries (unlike phones today that cost $100 minimum to have someone upgrade your battery).

So I put in batteries, and nothing happened.  A little Veronica-ing the gophersphere and I found instructions to hard boot it.  Viola!  The monocrhome screen flickered to life.

I found a sync cable that requires an 9 pin serial port, and in my bin of CD's, surprisingly, there were the CD's for Palm desktop.  Unfortunately what is missing here is the serial port, so Serial<>USB adapter is on order.

I showed it to my teenage kids.  They thought it was cool.  The first question of course was, "What games can it play?"  

I'm going to try to sync it up to my main calendar app somehow, and them embarass them by using it for awhile. 

I mean, what could be more cool than Dad whipping out the grey Palm III to log family appointments?

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Hard reboot info for Palm III:
Hold power button while gently pressing the reset button on the back of the device with a pin.  When the logo appears, release the poweer button.

Palm III, and all the following Palms, did not have the word "Pilot" in their name due to the previously mentioned trademark dispute. The Palm III had an IR port, backlight, and flash memory. The latter allowed the user to upgrade Palm OS, or, with some external applications, to store programs or data in flash memory. It ran on two standard AAA batteries. It was able to retain enough energy for 10–15 minutes to prevent data loss during battery replacement. It had 2 megabytes of memory, large at the time, and used Palm OS 3. (Palm also produced an upgrade card for the Pilot series, which made them functionally equivalent to a Palm III.)