Give him a hand: Dev publishes 25-year-old Palm OS tools to GitHub

A small but active community of retro computing enthusiasts is working to keep Palm OS alive, and a developer who recently became aware of their existence has just handed them a treasure trove of code he had no idea was still useful.

Swedish developer Aaron Ardiri published around a gigabyte of Palm OS development resources on GitHub on Thursday in a bid to preserve them for community consumption.

Prior to their upload, Ardiri told The Register that the files were languishing in his own personal backups for more than 25 years, preserved only for his own records as part of his past as a developer of Palm OS applications.

“Everything in the archive was accumulated during my years as an active Palm OS developer,” Ardiri explained in an email.

“It includes SDKs, technical documentation, conference presentations, development utilities, examples, and some limited system source code that was originally made available to developers to help them understand the operating system's UI and internal components.” One gigabyte of such info might not seem like a lot today, but back in the halcyon era of the PalmPilot, that was a whole heap of valuable data.

Ardiri had previously published source code from his own Palm OS apps on GitHub for those who were interested in it, but he had assumed it was just for public record and that no one would really want to muck about with old Palm OS apps.

“A developer recently submitted a pull request to my original Lemmings source repository, adding HiRes+ display support for the Palm Tungsten T3,” Ardiri explained.

“I had no idea people were still actively developing and improving this software more than two decades later.” That sent him down a rabbit hole.

He soon realized there were Palm OS enthusiasts on Reddit, Discord, and other online communities all looking for resources to keep their vintage hardware alive and their retro software viable.

“It made me realize that the old development resources sitting on my backup drives might actually be useful to people today,” he said.

And now here we are, with a nice, fat GitHub repo full of resources Palm OS users can make use of.

It’s worth noting that just because Ardiri has published this stuff on GitHub, that doesn’t mean it’s open source and ripe for the picking.

He’s taken steps to avoid stepping on any copyright toes by leaving out things like Palm OS ROM images, firmware, simulators, and commercial apps that he felt he ought not to distribute as he didn’t have explicit permission.

Ardiri sees this as a historical preservation effort, not an attempt to circumvent IP laws.