Here's a recent unexpected donation to the museum, a Palm III PDA. I found this being given away on a free site
The Palm III was the replacement for the original Palm Pilot from 3Com, it was released in 1998 and features a large 160x160 pixel four level greyscale touchscreen with electroluminescent backlight. The lower part of the screen in the input panel
The device uses a Motorola MC68328 CPU running at 16 MHz with 2MB of RAM with 2MB of ROM. There is a tiny speaker as well
The screen is protected by a detachable cover
The cover flips up to reveal the screen and control panel, and a handwriting cheat sheet is attached to the underside of the cover. The handwriting recognition area is the lower part of the panel, this makes the actual screen square, hence the 160x160 resolution
The base of the unit features the battery compartment, which takes 2 x AAA batteries, and the model label
The batteries go in alternate ways, despite the springs being on one side, this caught me out
Close up of the model label with reset button, and screen contrast control
Battery compartment, this is confusing at best
The unit features a stylus which slides out of the top, it is held in by friction
The buttons and handwriting area, the left most button turns on and off the screen and if you hold it while the screen is on it will turn on the backlight, which is at best, dim
The contrast control, it is recessed and is difficult to turn.
This is the connection to the host PC, it is covered by a spring loaded cover
There is also a infra-red port as well
This is the hotsync cradle, it uses a RS-232 serial connection, or you could use IrDA via the infre-red port. There is a dedicated sync button
The device in the cradle
I got all this documentation as well, but no driver/software discs
The device is fully working and here are some screenshots of it in use
?REDO FROM START ERROR