Technology built, explored and preserved.

Some of the most interesting work I have revisited recently is technology I originally developed more than twenty-five years ago.

During my years working with Palm OS, I accumulated a substantial collection of development tools, SDKs, documentation, examples and source code. Much of it had been sitting in personal backups since the platform disappeared from mainstream use.

That changed when a developer contacted me about improving my original Palm OS version of Lemmings, adding support for the larger display of the Tungsten T3. It introduced me to an active community of enthusiasts still developing software, restoring devices and exploring a platform I had assumed was largely forgotten.

I decided to make my historical development archive available on GitHub, in the hope that it might fill gaps in the documentation and resources available to the community.

Preservation is not simply about keeping old files. Source code, tools and documentation provide a record of how engineers solved problems under the constraints of their time. They also preserve knowledge that is easily lost when companies disappear and platforms are discontinued.

It has been particularly rewarding to see software I wrote decades ago being examined after publishing their source code online, but also being improved and run on the original hardware that still exists out again.