Developer publishes 25-year-old Palm OS development archive to GitHub

A discovery from the PalmPilot era

Swedish developer Aaron Ardiri has published approximately one gigabyte of Palm OS development resources to GitHub, making materials that had been sitting in his personal backups for more than 25 years available to the public.

The archive 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. Ardiri explained that everything in the archive was accumulated during his years as an active Palm OS developer and was preserved only for his own records.

A pull request sparks rediscovery

Ardiri said he had previously published source code from his own Palm OS apps on GitHub, assuming it was just for public record. That changed when a developer submitted a pull request to his original Lemmings source repository, adding HiRes+ display support for the Palm Tungsten T3 more than two decades after the software's release.

The submission led him to discover that Palm OS enthusiasts on Reddit, Discord, and other online communities are actively looking for resources to keep their vintage hardware alive and their retro software viable. He said the realization that the old development resources on his backup drives might actually be useful to people today prompted the publication.

Preservation with boundaries

Ardiri noted that publishing the archive does not mean the materials are open source. He deliberately left out Palm OS ROM images, firmware, simulators, and commercial apps that he felt he should not distribute without explicit permission, describing the effort as historical preservation rather than an attempt to circumvent IP laws.

He added that much early mobile development knowledge has disappeared with old websites, developer forums, and documentation archives, and that some of it survives only in personal collections like his own. Ardiri also recently passed off more than 50 old Palm OS devices to Russian developer and Palm OS preservationist Dmitry Grinberg.

Sources: The Register