In another clever hack, Wingman's developers achieved grayscale graphics from an operating system limited to one-bit-per-pixel, black-and-white display. The resulting remarkably potent application needed only 32 kilobytes of memory. That design shouldered the more taxing browser functions over to a proxy server, thereby leaving only page-display duties to the PalmPilot itself. The Wingman team at UC Berkeley came up with a "split browser" design to solve the problem.
But with only one megabyte of memory and a black-and-white display, the unit wasn't exactly graphical.
Once snapped into a modem, PalmPilot was already capable of simple text-based Web browsing. Wingman, the graphical Web browser, was one project riding the wave and pushing the little unit to the limit of its capabilities. "When those tools hit the Web, suddenly there was this huge spike in PalmPilot development," Purmal said.
PALM PILOT EMULATOR MAC CODE
The company had released the source code for those applications to the Net. "Without any support from us, a couple of guys had created these tools," Purmal said, referring to what fast became an independent effort to reverse-engineer existing PalmPilot applications.
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