The Palm is a personal digital assistant (PDA) which runs on the Palm Operating System (OS) as well as Windows Mobile platform. The Pilot is the first generation of PDAs manufactured by Palm. The original Palm Pilot was announced in January and released in late March, 1996. The first Palms, the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000, had no infrared port, backlight, or flash memory, but did have a serial communications port. Their RAM size was 128kB and 512kB and they used version 1 of the Palm OS.

The inventors of the Pilot were Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan, who also founded Palm Computing. The original idea behind Palm Computing was to create handwriting recognition programs, but after further research, the trio landed the idea to create better hardware that would eventually lead to the Palm. Rumor has it that Hawkins carried a block the wood, the size of the future pilot, in his pocket for a week in order to test and gauge the feel of the device

Numerous applications were developed for the later Palm Pilots. AstroPilot, for example, was a commercial package that contains a large electronic reference book containing detailed information about the 1,000 brightest stars, 12 pre-made star charts and 175 web links to astronomy related web pages.

The Palm is noted for doing significantly better than its competitor predecessors and was hailed for its ability to store personal information like addresses and phone numbers, take notes, and track appointments. The Palm devices are now smartphones which run the Palm OS as well as the Windows Mobile platform. Popular models today include the Treo and Centro.

The MuMoH physical collection includes an early version of the Palm Pilot.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_(PDA)
http://www.portents.com/marek/pilot/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11945300/