In some ways, Hawkins and the Pilot are a typical Silicon Valley story-years of hardscrabble technical work followed by a sudden leap into the financial stratosphere. Indeed, Hawkins soon did what successful computer pioneers often do: he left Palm in 1998 to create another new company. The secretive enterprise, called Handspring, has said only that it plans next year to introduce new hardware products based on Pilot software.

In other ways, though, Hawkins' story is different. Soon after graduating from Cornell's engineering school in 1982, he landed at Grid Systems, one of the first companies to make laptop computers. But all the while he was falling under the spell of another, wholly different field: neuroscience. His fascination grew so intense that in 1985 he abruptly left Grid and enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student in the field. Two years later, he returned to Grid with equal abruptness-but carried with him some ideas from neuroscience that he thought could have a big impact in the computer world. Indeed, the PalmPilot, which recognizes patterns written by a pen or stylus, is a direct spinoff from Hawkins' work in theoretical neuroscience. Grid's corporate parent, Tandy, became one of the original investors in Palm, which is now owned by 3Com.