Deeter Bone, you made a movie. It's kind of a movie. It's a documentary. It's a half an hour. It's half an hour count as a movie.

I say so. I mentioned this to Joanna Stern the other week on my show. I love the length of it because it's like I, you left me wanting more, but not like feeling incomplete. And I feel like there's an awful lot.

I noticed this during all of COVID like after my wife and I burned through everything on our list that we actually wanted to see and started watching random stuff.

There's an awful lot of documentaries that are to me stretched out to be feature length. And it's like, man, I would have been a tight half hour.

Yeah, I mean, if you don't know, it's a documentary about this company called Hanspring, which you probably spun out from Paul, it's about the trio, et cetera. I really was very aware that when you do these documentaries about nostalgia about something from a while ago, the first instinct is to make like, I don't know, like I love the 90s, right?

Bring in like a B list comedian to be like, oh, I had that thing. It was great. It had a keyboard to just like draw it out. And I knew I didn't want to do that. And I also knew that making something that had a larger scope that actually got into palm and WebOS and all of the messiness that came after would have taken way too long. And so I wanted to tell like a really tight, smaller story that had, but I hope felt like a beginning of middle and an end.

Because telling the whole story, it's like Lord of the Rings. It's got like 50 endings. The name of the movie is springboard. Where does that come from?

So springboard is the name of the slot. So there's a whole long story. The founders of Palm for reasons had to go quit and start their own company. They started Hanspring. They had to start making pdAs again. And they're like, well, what, what are we going to do to differentiate?

They hustled Palm into licensing the operating system to them. So they're going to make more pdAs. And they decide the way to differentiate was to make them cheaper, but also to have them have an expansion module.

And they decided to call that expansion module the springboard slot, the metaphor being that you could jump and expand it to do other things. And so that's where it came from. And the company itself was called Hanspring. And I think it was just something you hold in your hand. They ran out of ideas.

And actually Ed Colligan told me that one of the things they dealt with, and this is back in what 99 what it was founded, maybe 98 is they were looking for a dot com a URL that they could actually get, which back then was already a problem.

It's very funny. I had a Hanspring. I did not own a Palm device, but the first Palm OS device, first and only one I owned was a Hanspring visor.

And my wife got one too, and she's not a gadget nerd, but she loved it. We both did. It was it was a terrific product. It really was. And I know that there were a lot of Palm device aficionados before Hanspring.

But it really seemed like at least the classic black and white Palm OS reached it's peak with the Hanspring devices. And one of the weird angles of this is the way that Palm was always sort of the Bizarro Apple, where it was like Apple in the 90s got it before Steve Jobs came back in the next reunification tried it out of desperation.

Let's license the OS right all this time. And I think long story short, it's Wall Street when they see a grand success. They want everybody else to do the same thing. And Microsoft famously had a very they had a very good 90s until they didn't with the DOJ, but financially even through the antitrust investigation.

They were making money faster than they could put it in a bank. And how did they make their money by licensing software. And so Wall Street, even before Apple got in trouble was constantly saying Apple should license the OS Apple should license the OS because that's where the money is not really understanding at all that Apple and Microsoft were fundamentally different companies.

And then eventually Apple got into dire straits and they were like well we're screwed. All right, we'll just license the OS, which was a bad idea. And Palm similarly never should have licensed the OS to Hanspring because all of a sudden the best Palm devices were not made by Palm.

Yeah, no licensing the OS was one of the reasons that there was conflict between Donna the CEO Jeff the product guy and Ed and the three com who at the time was a parent company when they quit and created their own company.

Three com really thought that the move was to license Paul, OS and other people that Hanspring they're like no, it needs to be software hardware together. And so don't do that.

And three com said no, no, we've got this vision. We make modems right now and maybe some like networking equipment, but we're going to everything that connects to the internet. We're going to have a piece of so we're going to have the handheld computers all the way up to the networking stack.

And other people like well, this is this is stupid. So they quit. And then they they call them back and like you still planning on licensing this thing and Palm is like yeah, no, we're going to do it. Okay, we'll give us one.

And there were some other companies that licensed it a Sony made some very, very, very nerdy pda's called the clays that were like there were like the gadgets gadgets that ever did gadget.

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