
Palm anounced that when the Russian Soyuz rocket launched yesterday, bound for the International Space Station, South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, the first African to venture into space, took with him a Palm m125 handheld–the only handheld computer to be approved for space travel on the Soyuz. Because Mark’s activities in space are scheduled down to the minute, a special scheduling application was needed to meet the unique requirements of the project. Palm South Africa worked with the “First African in Space Project” coordinators and a South African Palm OS developer company, Rafale, to create a customized Date Book application so that Mark’s events could be programmed on a minute-by-minute basis.