A great big domineering company that’s synonymous with communications equipment. A spunky little company with a cool, pocketable gadget that brings new technology to the masses. Today’s news that Cisco is spending $590 million in stock to buy Pure Digital, makers of the Flip line of low-cost, easy-to-use camcorders, reminded me of another acquisition that happened so long ago that I’d almost forgotten about it: The buyout of PalmPilot creator Palm Computing by one-time modem kingpin US Robotics back in 1995.
But once I started thinking about the Palm/US Robotics marriage, I remembered a historical tidbit that’s worth recording. I met with Palm executives in 1995, months before the first Palm PDA was announced. (At the time, they told me it was going to be called Taxi, but that’s another story for another time.)