On its first day of trading, Palm was worth almost twice as much as the company that owned it. Shares priced at $38 touched $165 and closed at $95.06, giving Palm a market value of $53.4 billion. Its parent, 3Com, still held 94 percent of the stock, yet 3Com itself was worth only about $28 billion that afternoon. It was March 2, 2000, eight days before the Nasdaq peaked, and the market had decided the future fit in a palm.

A Block of Wood

Jeff Hawkins founded Palm in 1992 with Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan. Hawkins is said to have carried a wooden block cut to pocket size to test how a handheld should feel. Early handhelds had failed because they tried to do too much. The PalmPilot, launched in 1996, did a few things well: calendar, contacts, notes, and a quick sync with a desktop computer. U.S. Robotics bought Palm in 1995, and 3Com bought U.S. Robotics in 1997.

Pilot, Treo, Pre, HP

3Com handed its remaining Palm shares to its own stockholders later in 2000. Then the bubble burst, and Palm's stock fell with everything else. The company split its software arm off as PalmSource in 2003. It found a second hit with the Treo smartphone and a third try with the Pre and its webOS software in 2009. By then the iPhone owned the market. Hewlett-Packard bought Palm in 2010 for about $1.2 billion.

Cover: Palm Springs, Wallace L. DeWolf. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a lone palm tree.