Converters for Palm

Palm Inc. was a pioneering company in the development of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile computing platforms during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Its flagship operating system, Palm OS, was widely adopted across handheld devices and became a standard for mobile productivity. The architecture of Palm OS relied heavily on proprietary file formats designed to optimize performance and storage within constrained hardware environments. These formats were integral to application deployment, data management, and content delivery on Palm devices.

Among the most prominent file formats used by Palm Inc. were PDB (Palm Database), PRC (Palm Resource Compiler), PML (Palm Markup Language), and PMLZ (Zipped Palm Markup Language). The PDB format served as a general-purpose container for structured data, commonly used by core applications such as Memo Pad, Address Book, and To-Do List. PRC files, while similar in structure to PDB, were typically reserved for executable code and application resources. Both formats included metadata headers, record structures, and optional application-specific blocks such as AppInfo and SortInfo. These formats supported efficient synchronization and were recognized by their unique Creator IDs, which linked data files to their corresponding applications.

PML and PMLZ were specialized formats used primarily for eBook content. PML was a lightweight markup language that defined layout and formatting instructions for text-based documents. It included tags for styling, navigation, and embedded media. PMLZ, on the other hand, was a compressed archive containing one or more PML files, often bundled with associated PDB files to create distributable eBooks for Palm's eReader application. These formats enabled rich document presentation within the limited graphical capabilities of Palm devices. Collectively, Palm's file format ecosystem exemplified a modular and extensible design philosophy tailored to mobile computing constraints, and it laid foundational concepts for modern mobile file systems and application packaging.