[Overview]
In the 1990s, Jacques Gauchey was a journalist and writer living in
Silicon Valley and specializing in IT (information technology). He was
also working as a "facilitator" between the United States and Europe.
Jacques was among the first to buy a Palm Pilot in March 1996, and
wrote about it in his free online newsletter. As a side remark, he
remembered in July 1999: "In 1996 I published a few issues of a free
English newsletter on the internet. It had about 10 readers per issue
until the day (in January 1996) when the electronic version of Wired
Magazine created a link to it. In one week I got about 100 emails, some
from French readers of my book La vallée du risque - Silicon Valley
[editor's note: The Valley of Risk - Silicon Valley, published by Plon,
Paris, in 1990], who were happy to find me again." He added: "All my
clients now are internet companies. All my working tools (my mobile
phone, my PDA and my PC) are or will soon be linked to the internet."
Despite fierce competition, Palm stayed the leader in the PDA market,
with 23 million Palm Pilots sold between 1996 and 2002.