VISUAL STRATEGY GUIDE
HISTORY TIMELINE
13
1996
1997
2000
1996 The initial development-The invention of Palm Pilot.
1997 The US. Robotics became the subsidiary of Palm and 3Com.
2000 Palm Company’s new founding and acquisition
Pilot was the name of the first generation of personal digital assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996. The original purpose of this company was to create handwriting recognition software, named PalmPrint, and personal information management (PIM) software, named PalmOrganizer for the PEN/GEOS based Zoomer devices.
In June 1997, U.S. Robotics was acquired by 3Com and Palm became a 3Com subsidiary. In June 1998, thefounders became unhappy with the direction in which 3Com was taking the company, and left to found Handspring.
3Com made the Palm subsidiary an independent, publicly traded company on March 1, 2000, and it traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol PALM. Palm Inc had its IPO during the dot-com bubble and in its first day of trading the shares of the new company hit an all-time high of US$95.06. But competition and the end of the tech bubble caused Palm’s shares to lose 90% of their value in just over a year.