The Woman from Benton Harbor Who Gave Us the Palm Pilot

Whether you’re reading this article on a computer, tablet, or smartphone, you owe a debt of gratitude to a woman from Benton Harbor who helped make it all possible.

Her name is Donna Dubinsky, and she graduated from Benton Harbor High School in 1973, one year ahead of a basketball player named David Adkins, who later became the famous comedian Sinbad.

If you don’t know Dubinsky’s name, you certainly know her work. She was at the forefront of every major technological advance of our generation—computers, handheld devices, smartphones, and artificial intelligence. If it weren’t for her, you wouldn’t be reading these words on an iPhone. She’s a tech legend and then some.

She was an executive at Apple in her late 20s, she was the co-founder and CEO of the companies that invented the first handheld computer and smartphone, and then she became a pioneer in the field of AI. She’s in every computer-related hall of fame there is, and she’s considered one of the most influential women in tech history.

Donna wasn’t an inventor or engineer. She was a genius on the business side; recognizing how to make these new gadgets better, faster, or more economical, and figuring out how all this new technology could make our lives better. More than anything, she wanted to make it affordable and accessible.

“I've been at the forefront of every major revolution in the past 40 years and have helped make those things happen,” she said in a 2023 interview with the Computer History Museum. “And what a thrill it's been to have a career that's been so much about creating new things. It’s been very rewarding to bring new value to people's lives and give them tools that can help them do things that they couldn't otherwise do. And I feel very proud of having done that.”

Every Michigander should be proud of Donna Dubinsky, the Benton Harbor Tiger who brought technology to the everyman. We’re the state that put America on wheels, and we’re also home to the woman who put computers in our pockets.

Every Michigander needs to know her story, too, so sit back and enjoy the tale of Benton Harbor’s own Donna Lee Dubinsky.

The story starts on the July 4, 1955, when Donna was born to Alfred and Lillian Dubinsky. She spent the first few years of her life in Cleveland, and Alfred moved the family to Benton Harbor in the mid-1960s so that he could take a job at a local aluminum factory. They settled in the Fairplain area, one of Benton Harbor’s nicer neighborhoods.

Donna went to Fairplain Junior High and then Benton Harbor High School, where she was active in band (playing the clarinet) and theater and served as the editor of the yearbook her senior year. In band, she sat next to a fellow clarinetist named Mike Adkins, whose little brother, David, eventually became the comedian and TV star we know as Sinbad.

Benton Harbor had some nice areas back then, but for the most part, it was the same hardscrabble town it is now. And while Donna loved the extracurriculars and her social life at Benton Harbor High School, it wasn’t a stellar place for academics.

“It was a rough school, for sure,” she said. “It was a pretty classic urban school, struggling with resources, struggling with meeting the needs of the kids in the community. I remember doing a lot of independent study and sitting in the back of the room and working on other things because I just was, you know, not in the norm. I mean, I had people in my classes who couldn't read, literally, in junior high and in high school. I ended up going to a junior college for my senior year.”

She had planned on going to the University of Michigan but applied to Yale on a whim and was accepted. From then on, her life and career were a rocket ride to the top. She graduated from Yale and then got her MBA at the Harvard Business School. While at Harvard, she saw a demonstration of a new computer called the Apple IIE and decided she wanted to work at Apple Computers.

Steve Jobs hired her, and within just a few years, by the time she was 29, she was in charge of customer service and product distribution.

In 1985, she had a standoff with Steve Jobs that became so famous and so noteworthy that they teach about it today at the Harvard Business School. In a nutshell, Steve Jobs wanted to eliminate Apple’s warehouses and just assemble and ship computers as they were ordered. Donna, all 29 years of her, stood up to Jobs and told him his plan wouldn’t work. She then offered to resign if she was proven wrong.

They did it her way, and it proved to be exactly the right move. Forty-one years later, people still celebrate the way she stood up to her legendary boss.

For the record, she clarifies that Steve Jobs didn’t exactly admit he was wrong. “I wish that was correct, but it isn’t,” she said. “Steve did not change his mind on distribution strategy. Actually, he left the company.”

She was proven so right that it actually made him quit. Even better. That case made her something of a legend in the tech world herself, and after 10 years at Apple and its subsidiary Claris, Donna took over as the CEO of a new company called Palm Inc. In 1996, with Donna at the forefront, they launched the device that became the first commercially successful handheld computer—or Personal Data Assistant (PDA)—the Palm Pilot.

Even taking into account everything else she’s done in her career, serving as the CEO who delivered the Palm Pilot to the world is probably Donna Dubinsky’s crowning achievement. That device was wildly popular and laid the groundwork for the iPad, the iPhone, and every smartphone and tablet that’s in use today. The Palm Pilot made them all possible.

Interestingly for folks in Benton Harbor, it was also the Palm Pilot that reconnected Donna Dubinsky with her old classmate from Benton Harbor High School, David “Sinbad” Adkins.

According to a 1999 article in their hometown newspaper, the Benton Harbor Herald-Palladium, Sinbad had been a Palm Pilot user for several years, and when he found out that it was his classmate who had developed it, he called her up—just to let her know how much he loved it.

“I bought five Palm Pilots for my staff,” he said. “What better way to exchange information than using the Palm Pilot?”

After a few years at Palm Inc., though, Donna and two compatriots, engineer Jeff Hawkins and marketing manager Ed Colligan, branched off and founded a new company called Handspring. That company developed a product called the Treo, which was the first mainstream smartphone.

From there, she co-founded a company called Numenta in 2005, which was an early pioneer in artificial intelligence. They work to develop machine intelligence by using principles found in the human body’s neocortex.

More than 50 years after graduating from Benton Harbor, she continues to move at the speed of light. In 2022, she went to work for the U.S. Department of Commerce (her first government job) at the invitation of Gina Raimondo, taking charge of the CHIPS and Science Act, which was passed into law three months after she took charge.

She’s also served as a trustee at Yale University and a trustee at the Computer History Museum. In 2007, she was awarded the Harvard Business School’s highest honor, the Alumni Achievement Award.

Not bad for a clarinet player from Benton Harbor High School.

Donna and her husband Len Shustek are also major philanthropists, supporting the Computer History Museum and various education and tech-centered nonprofits.

She’s still working, still looking to develop the Next Great Thing that will make people’s lives better, and she’s often asked what words of inspiration she can offer to people like the little girl who was spending all her time at the Fairplain Junior High School library in the late 1960s.

“I'm always bad at this question,” she said. “It's like, I don't think women's needs are that much different than men's needs. They both need to step up and do good work.”

Step up and do good work. Sounds like a Michigan slogan if I’ve ever heard one.

Good on you, Donna.