Give him a hand: Dev publishes 25-year-old Palm OS tools to GitHub
Swedish developer Aaron Ardiri has published around a gigabyte of Palm OS development resources on GitHub after discovering that enthusiasts are still maintaining and improving software for the vintage platform. The release gives the community access to material that had sat in his personal backups for more than 25 years, helping preserve knowledge that has disappeared from old websites and forums.
The archive includes software development kits, technical documents, conference presentations, utilities, examples and limited system source code. Ardiri was prompted by a community contribution adding high-resolution display support to his Palm Lemmings code; he has excluded ROM images, firmware, simulators and commercial apps he lacked permission to share. He also recently gave more than 50 old Palm OS devices to preservationist Dmitry Grinberg.
- Aaron Ardiri shared around a gigabyte of Palm OS development material.
- The archive had been in his backups for over 25 years.
- Copyright-sensitive software and firmware were left out.
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Palm OS was the software used by Palm handheld computers, popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s for tasks such as keeping contacts, notes and calendars. Developers built apps for it using specialised tools and documents, many of which were later hard to find as old websites and forums disappeared.
Aaron Ardiri is a Swedish developer who worked on Palm software, including a version of the puzzle game Lemmings. Dmitry Grinberg is a preservationist who collects and maintains older technology, while enthusiasts continue to adapt Palm software for devices with newer features.
Preserving development resources helps people study how Palm software was made and keep existing programmes working. Sharing the material also raises questions about what can be freely redistributed, since some software, firmware and device system files remain protected or unavailable for sharing.