Handspring Visor Prism
June is Pride Month, so for today’s entry in my “Zscaler Logo on a Weird, Old, or Obsolete Device” series, I wanted to highlight a gadget capable of doing justice to Zscaler’s beautiful rainbow logo: the Handspring Visor Prism!
After starting Palm 1992 and popularizing the concept of a PDA (“Personal Digital Assistant”) with the Palm Pilot, original cofounders Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan left Palm in 1998 to launch Handspring, a new rival to their former company. Handspring cleverly licensed the popular and widely-supported Palm system software (“PalmOS”) from their former colleagues, but differentiated themselves from Palm by offering an impressive line of powerful Palm-compatible handheld devices.
In February 2000, Palm released the Palm IIIc, which was the first device to introduce a color display to a mass-market handheld computer. Running at 20MHz, the Palm IIIc was a moderately popular device at the time but it only supported a maximum of 256 colors onscreen at any one time (aka 8-bit color).
Just a few months later, rival Handspring unveiled their new top-of-the-line handheld: the Visor Prism. Running at a blistering 33MHz and sporting a color screen capable of displaying 65,536 colors (aka 16-bit color), the Visor Prism instantly set a new standard for handheld computers. In addition to its fast CPU and colorful display, the Visor Prism incorporates Handspring’s trademark “SpringBoard” expansion slot on the back of the device, making it easy to slot in a huge variety of accessories - MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS modules, game cartridges, and more. As an expensive “flagship” device, the Visor Prism was never a best seller. However, it raised the bar for what consumers could expect from a pocket computer, and it laid important groundwork for later devices like the Handspring Treo, one of the first widely-adopted smartphones.
Pride Month is an opportunity for our LGBTQ+ friends, family, colleagues, and community members to show their “true colors,” celebrating social progress while also keeping an eye on the future - an annual reminder that fundamental human rights must always be defended. I know it’s a little cheesy for me to link something so important to a silly post about an old handheld computer, but at the end of the day, I value anything that lets me really see all the colors of our rich human tapestry, whether literally or figuratively. Happy Friday, and happy Pride Month!
