[HN Gopher] Symbian Source Code
___________________________________________________________________
Symbian Source Code
Author : thunderbong
Score : 325 points
Date : 2022-05-24 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| wow this gives me nostalgia. Symbian was probably the start of
| the smartphones era.
| btreesOfSpring wrote:
| It feels like Garmin devices are still dependent on this era's
| tools. When someone asks me about issues with using my Garmin
| Edge 1030 for navigation, I often say it works fine enough but it
| is sort of like using a Symbian phone in the early 2000s.
| secondcoming wrote:
| I think a fair amount of Symbian devs went to Garmin when
| Symbian ceased to exist.
| gendal wrote:
| There's a great (and insanely detailed) book on the rise and fall
| of Symbian by a guy who was there for most, if not all, of the
| journey:
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab...
|
| When I say detailed, I mean detailed... David Wood seems to have
| copies of every email and memo he ever wrote when he was there...
| and he doesn't hold back when it comes to sharing them.
|
| Required reading for anybody seeking to build a platform
| business.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Find the post in that article by Dennis May. It explains Nokia.
| The atmosphere in Symbian/Nokia towards the end was really bad.
| leafmeal wrote:
| I was looking for their implementation of T9, but haven't found
| it yet. Would that be in here? Does anyone with more context or
| Google-foo know where it is?
| ARTeamer wrote:
| A lifetime ago, I spent lots of long hours on reversing Symbian
| apps, writing tools and tutorials for it. Any old souls here from
| the reverse engineering community of that era will recognize my
| username. :)
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Was it a waste of time?
| oflebbe wrote:
| i miss epoc32 source
| exikyut wrote:
| This is a thing?
| marcodiego wrote:
| I have to cite Nokia N8 [1]. It had USB otg, mini hdmi, FM
| receiver, FM transmitter, MicroSD memory card, TV out and Nokia
| later released a TV receiver adapter for it.
|
| A friend of mine had one. He said he spent a few days in the
| countryside watching films he copied to an SD card on an old tube
| TV with it. He also told me how he could play MP3 files and
| listen it on the old FM radio that was available in the house he
| was in. It was also possible for him, once in a city a few
| kilometers away, to answer e-mails and read news using WiFi. You
| could just plug the mini HDMI to a modern TV, plug a keyboard on
| it and use a Bluetooth mouse to get a fully functional computer
| where you could even write and run python programs. All this at a
| time when basically nobody even talked about "convergence".
|
| We've been walking backwards since then. These days the only
| devices able to give similar power are the still unpolished
| linuxphones. That's why we should support them or else we will
| continue walking backwards.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N8
| seclorum_wien wrote:
| > linuxphones
|
| A hacker friend of mine carries around his pixel, which he has
| set up to use DAS KEYBOARD (ohne buchstaben) as his Linux
| development workstation.
|
| This is a wonder to see, honestly. Truly a cyberpunk scenario
| out there on the edge of linuxphones.
|
| Apropos, I flunk out with my PinephonePro+KB setup, which
| doesn't work nearly as well as his rig. Grr, power management
| "last 1%" ..
| tjoff wrote:
| Yeah, the fact that we call iphone/android smartphones is kind
| of triggering. Especially in the early days they represented
| the dumbest phones imaginable, with the only saving grace
| having a better app-store to try and make up for it.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Originally the N8 was going to run Meego. The N8 should have
| been a flagship phone running Linux. Instead they chickened out
| and and went with Symbian instead; pretty late in the
| development process.
|
| I had an N8. Really nice device. A 13 megapixel camera in 2010?
| was pretty awesome and the aluminium body plus oled screen were
| pretty amazing as well. It actually had a screen saver mode
| that would stay on during the night where they'd only light a
| few pixels to show a clock.
|
| But it was crippled by the OS; Symbian just wasn't great. And
| of course it still featured the resistive touch screen instead
| of a capacitive one (which Apple used).
|
| Meego eventually shipped via the N900 (nice but very awkward
| form factor) and the only device that could have been great,
| the N9. Except they launched that years late and with the
| announcement that whole platform was being cancelled and the
| phone was for developers only. A misguided UI switch from GTK
| to QT, which Nokia bought to rescue Symbian did not help
| either.
|
| Then windows phone started happening and and they
| unceremoniously killed Symbian. Then they handed the keys to
| MS. Somewhere in between, Nokia actually shipped a Nokia
| Android device, which MS promptly killed. Nokia also had
| another Linux platform (called Meltemi) under development aimed
| at feature phones. But that whole department got layed off a
| few months before the MS acquisition. I actually got caught up
| in that particular round (despite never having worked in that
| department). In the years after that, tens of thousands of
| engineers were shown the door. Probably the most bizarre and
| one of the largest layoff round of highly qualified hardware
| and software engineers in recent history.
|
| Nokia had a great thing and they ran it straight into the
| ground. Arrogance and incompetence lead to a lot of bad
| decision making. The N8 is probably the key moment it went
| wrong for Nokia. They had all the solutions ready for market
| and then they chickened out and stuck with Symbian. There was
| more than a little bit of anger inside the company about that
| decision. The Symbian camp won and killed the company.
| Absolutely nothing they tried in the nearly three years that
| followed worked out.
| kerpele wrote:
| Not sure where your information that n8 was supposed to run
| Meego comes from, but I remember working with the Nokia s60
| team already early 2009 and they were using n8 protos at the
| time. It's definitely possible that there were two parallel
| projects though.
|
| On the other hand, Maemo, the predecessor to Meego, required
| a pen-like pointer to comfortable use at the time as the UI
| elements were designed to be small. Only after they
| completely overhauled the UI (and renamed the Linux based OS
| Meego) it could have worked on the N8.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I still belief Elop was a MS trojan horse to somehow get the
| Nokia phone devision to Microsoft. The whole "burning
| platform" memo together with hamstringing the N9 which was a
| great phone (I used one until the battery died some day) and
| OS (maybe we would not have this IOS/android duopoly if Nokia
| would have really pushed Meego), it all seemed incredibly
| unprofessional and more like the actions of someone
| competitor not what the CEO would do.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| He was appointed by a Nokia board looking to sell the
| business to MS. He was a patsy. Most of the bad decision
| making happened before Elop. And they appointed him to
| finish the job. The fault lies with the Nokia management
| and the board, including their former CEO, Jorma Ollila.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| It was capacitive touch. The catch was it was not bonded to
| the lcd like more modern smart phones are. This meant that it
| was a 5 minute job by a smart 13 year old to replace the
| digitizer without needing to replace the lcd.
|
| I loved my N8. Built-in FM transmitter was awesome. And don't
| get me started on how many times it got dropped and laughed
| it off. At least 50 times onto concrete and such.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Ah true, I forgot about that. The N8 was one of the first
| devices where they fixed that.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| It's funny how the top two comments on this article are (1)
| yours, talking about how far ahead of its time this phone was,
| even compared to modern phones in 2022 and (2) another post
| from a Nokia engineer talking about how frustratingly limited
| Symbian was thanks to cooperative multitasking, etc.
|
| Of course, both are simultaneously true.
|
| As you say, this phone was definitely ahead of its time as an
| open computing platform.
|
| I had no idea that it even had an FM transmitter and support
| for composite video as well as HDMI. Thank you for sharing
| that.
| pavlov wrote:
| Symbian wasn't actually limited to cooperative multitasking.
| The kernel certainly supported preemptive multitasking, and
| apps could use multithreading if they wanted to. The POSIX
| threads API was available too.
|
| However since everything in Symbian was designed first and
| foremost to minimize power use and memory requirements, the
| framework actively recommended against use of threads.
| Instead they asked you to schedule things on the app's main
| thread which gave the framework more control over when to run
| your callbacks. This wasn't a terrible idea at all, but the
| implementation of this system as a C++ multiple inheritance
| contraption was pretty confusing as I recall.
| secondcoming wrote:
| CActiveScheduler ran your CActive::RunL(), IIRC
| rollcat wrote:
| > That's why we should support them or else we will continue
| walking backwards.
|
| I would love to, but the reality is that unless you're in the
| Android/iOS duopoly ecosystem, you're increasingly unable to
| participate in some parts of society. Talking to people,
| banking, food delivery, parking, public transport...
| marcodiego wrote:
| Linux on the desktop was similar to that in early 2000's:
| hardware, software and services were frequently not
| compatible. The IE monopoly made things even worse. Pioneers
| suffered, there are still some problems, but the landscape
| changed drastically because of those people. Some pioneers
| must be willing to change the world and pay the price for
| that.
| dm319 wrote:
| As other's have already mentioned, Symbian traces it routes
| back to the early Psion Organisers, which ran a pre-emptive
| multitasking operating system before Windows did, and was
| thought to be Microsoft's biggest competitor back then [1].
| I've used the Psion II, and had a 3a, which you could program
| in their basic-like OPL language. The 5mx looked like Win95 in
| a palmtop and was a great pocket computing device with a
| reasonable keyboard, terminal, email client and internet
| connectivity. I remember back in 1998 or so looking longingly
| at the expensive phones that came with a built-in modem (Nokia
| 6210 and Ericsson R320 from memory), so I could use email and
| web on the go. Nokia took EPOC and became the lead in the
| Symbian consortium, using it on spiritual successors of the
| Psions - the 9300 and 9500, and when the E90 came out with a
| magnesium case and built in keyboard I had to get one.
|
| That was in 2007, around the time of the first iphone, but was
| so much more capable. Incredible at that time having all that
| power in your pocket. I never got lost in foreign cities
| because I could just get a GPS lock on the train station and
| find my way back, without using very expensive data in a
| foreign country. It was a strange thing being able to access
| the internet anywhere back then. In some ways it was a better
| time - social media networks hadn't cottoned on to the ability
| to deliver dopamine from the pockets of world's population, so
| the device felt powerful, but not like a ball and chain, or
| distraction-device like my pixel does these days.
|
| [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/why-is-bill-gates-so-
| scar...
| jw1224 wrote:
| Got a lot of nostalgia seeing OPL being mentioned...
|
| Twenty years ago my grandfather gave me his old Psion 3c. To
| a curious 10-year-old, the novelties of a world clock,
| spreadsheet and diary grew old after a few hours -- but OPL
| caught my imagination...
|
| Here I am now, two decades later, programming professionally
| full time as a startup founder -- all thanks to a dinky
| little BASIC-like language on a pocket organizer from the
| early 90s :)
| [deleted]
| pavlov wrote:
| I also had a Nokia N8. The UI was absurdly bad compared to
| iPhone at the same price.
|
| It's not obvious in Nokia's carefully crafted screenshots, but
| the N8 UI was very static, slow, and unfriendly to touch
| actions. It was fundamentally designed around menu navigation
| on phone keypads. That's not something you can simply fix by
| making the menu items touchable instead of using arrow keys,
| yet that's basically what Nokia tried to do.
| flaviojuvenal wrote:
| Besides the awful UI, it missed several key third-party apps
| that Android and iOS had. Also the GMail integration was
| pretty bad.
| oofbey wrote:
| Looking through some of this code is a painful reminder of the
| time when lots of people thought XML was a good idea.
|
| <math result="sf.spec.sbs.numberofjobs"
| operand1="${env.NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS}" operation=" _" operand2=
| "2" datatype="int"/>
|
| instead of
|
| numberofjobs = NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS _ 2
|
| Talk about a headwind to productivity.
| seclorum_wien wrote:
| I cringe at the places I've used XML for things like
| declarative programming, its just too obnoxious to think about.
|
| However, as someone who is currently pushing bytecode on the
| wire in place of such things, because reasons, I can only tell
| you the madness is just a toolchain away.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| The example he gives may just be a config file. XML was very
| popular for holding configuration, replacing the ancient
| property name/value pair system.
| lproven wrote:
| It is odd to see people talking about how Symbian was so early
| on, in the smartphone era.
|
| It's considerably more mature than that. :-) (For the avoidance
| of doubt: this is a _good thing_.)
|
| Symbian was a rebrand of the Psion 5 and 5MX OS, which was called
| EPOC32. It also ran on some other hardware, including the
| Ericsson MC218, Oregon Scientific Osaris, and Geofox One.
|
| The first EPOC32 device was the Psion 5 in 1997:
|
| http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/5300/Psion-Series-5/
|
| Succeeded by the 5MX:
|
| https://uxdesign.cc/psion-pda-how-does-it-look-today-327e01b...
|
| https://thenewstack.io/retrocomputing-in-modern-times-redisc...
|
| In other words, this OS was out there in the real world, in use
| by hundreds of thousands of people, _five years_ before the first
| Symbian device (Nokia 7650).
| markb139 wrote:
| The first Symbian based Nokia device was the 9210. I helped
| integrate the fax functionality - was amazing to see the first
| faxes sent and received :)
| lproven wrote:
| Fair enough! I defer to your superior wisdom.
|
| So, four years earlier, not five. :-)
|
| I have seen comments from people who worked at Accenture in
| the last days of Symbian, about the difficulty of putting
| together the build system today. Apparently bits need a
| specific MS C++ compiler that only runs on WinXP.
|
| I think it would be _wonderful_ to see this resurrected and
| ported to the RasPi or something. Symbian was capable of SMP,
| and there were a lot of 3rd party apps back in the day.
|
| One of the things that crippled Symbian in the market was the
| range of UIs, all incompatible. I owned devices running
| Series 90 (Nokia 7710), Series 60 (E90 Communicator), and UIQ
| (Sony-Ericsson P910i). There was also Series 80 (earlier
| Communicators), and MOAP and OPP in Japan only.
|
| AIUI all needed different programming tools and apps from one
| couldn't run on the other.
|
| Frankly, none of that matters any more. Whatever is in this
| FOSS release and can be used with modern FOSS tooling is all
| that matters. Nobody needs early-noughties phone apps on a
| RasPi. Just something that can be used on a desktop with a
| mouse and keyboard.
|
| I suspect a few old Psion and Symbian enthusiasts would
| appear and enjoy modernising their own apps to get them
| working again. It's not _that_ long ago.
|
| EPOC32 and Symbian were great OSes to use: fast as hell,
| stable, and low-resource. On a RasPi 4 I think it'd stomp all
| over Linux, and it's vastly more modern than RISC OS.
|
| C++ has come a long way, too, since Psion chose it. The rough
| edges have been smoothed away.
| [deleted]
| gjvc wrote:
| Thank you for that summary (and I have an email in my drafts
| folder for you! will send it soon, honest :-))
| miohtama wrote:
| Do you think there is anything useful for modern day programmer
| in the codebase? Any value on this code for anyone, anymore?
|
| Or do we have better alternatives and rewrites for everything
| that can be found in this repo?
| atleta wrote:
| I used to work for Nokia Research during the mid 2000's. I
| remember how hard it was to get the source code for this back
| then as internal employees... One of my colleagues was working on
| a research prototype that needed tighter integration with the
| system than what you could achieve with a deployed app. So he
| needed the source code and the build environment for the OS.
|
| And for that he needed quite a few people to agree and he had to
| sign an NDA (again, as an employee, not a subcontractor!). Then,
| of course the whole thing was pretty hard to make work on his
| machine.
|
| Later on I did some work with the (public) SDK as well. The build
| system was based on the GNU toolchain. More precisely, a windows
| port of the GNU toolchain, so it would only work on windows. But
| even on windows it had a lot of warts (because these tools were
| build for unix in the first place, so e.g. drive letters and back
| slashes were problematic). As far as I can remember, a lot of the
| build tools were written in perl. There was some script to
| generate makefiles for your project and even that, as far as I
| can remember had a front end script. (I remember something called
| MAKMAKE.BAT, but I may be wrong.)
|
| The whole thing was a pretty frustrating experience. And we
| haven't talked about the libraries, the OS (cooperative multi
| tasking, everything is a callback) or memory management
| ('descriptors' that made trivial string operations a pain). No
| wonder it couldn't keep up with android and ios. Now, to be fair,
| the OS was based on a core and concepts created in the mid 1990s
| to allow software development on devices with 64k of memory or
| something. But even with several megabytes of RAM (so the early
| 2000s), that programming model was obviously way too
| constraining.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| One of my colleagues in Nokia Research Center actually created
| and maintained the python port to symbian. He was dealing with
| some crazy stuff. NRC actually ported quite a bit of oss to
| Symbian. You could actually run a webserver on the device which
| you could share to the internet with a reverse proxy. So, you
| could host your own photos from your device or use it as a
| webcam. Php, apache, mysql were part of this effort if I
| remember correctly. Another team in the same lab was
| responsible for porting Webkit to Symbian. This actually
| shipped when the iphone was nothing but a rumor. Ajax websites
| running on a smart phone. In 2005 when Ajax was still a new
| thing. Amazing stuff.
|
| Of course all of this was labelled as research and wasn't taken
| too serious by the business units until it was too late. A
| pity, because a lot of the stuff that NRC produced wasn't bad.
| There was a thing called friendview that existed before
| foursquare was a thing where you could share your location on a
| map with friends. The team that did that also did another app
| that allowed people to share photos. Instagram was not a thing
| yet back then. Another team was doing a thing called sports
| tracker. These were tiny teams doing amazing things. Sports
| tracker basically was allowed to take their software outside of
| Nokia and create a company around it. Nokia shipped a lot of
| stuff like this via Nokia Betalabs. A lot of that stuff came
| from teams in Nokia Research Center.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Confirming that I was able to run a webserver on my Nokia
| 3650 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 back in 2004.
| Those were the days when T-Mobile USA actually gave you a
| public IP address! It was pretty awesome to be able to
| download photos from the phone via the web - even if only at
| GPRS speeds.
| teknolog wrote:
| Sports Tracker was awesome. I used it for years before it
| stopped being competitive with Strava and more modern
| offerings.
| miohtama wrote:
| I was working on the mobile web server project. The project
| was heavily subcontracted to a company in Oulu, Finland,
| where I worked by the time before starting a career in open
| source and Python consultancy. Mobile web server was a Series
| 60 web server, based on Apache, some glue and reverse proxy
| gateway (written in Java). You could deploy your own "apps"
| that could be accessed by anyone, running on your mobile
| phone.
|
| Unfortunely, the project did not have a real business use
| case. People believed that peer-to-peer is a thing (XMPP,
| BitTorrent, IRC) and this would drive mobile-to-mobile
| interactions. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be true.
|
| Later me and my friend ported Python to Series 60 with our
| own rewrite, as Nokia's official port had many issues.
| Unfortunately by this time Series 60 was already losing
| market share for iPhone and Android. Furthermore we found
| that because of module import delay, Python will never be a
| good run-time for mobile applications, unless you do some
| sort of a binary dump/prewarmed up interpreter.
| liuliu wrote:
| Binary dump / prewarmed up Python interpreter would be
| amazing even today. Could enable a lot use cases with
| Python.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _The whole thing was a pretty frustrating experience. And we
| haven 't talked about the libraries, the OS (cooperative multi
| tasking, everything is a callback) or memory management
| ('descriptors' that made trivial string operations a pain)._
|
| My understanding, as someone who was peripherally in contact
| with Symbian in 2007-2011, is that the multitasking concepts
| were based on the Actor model [1]. This is indeed a kind of
| callback-based cooperative multi-tasking, but it fits very well
| in Symbian's tasks-as-C++-objects concept.
|
| C/C++ strings are a nightmare from a memory-management and
| reliability perspective, so I can't blame them for doing it
| differently. However their tooling was indeed not up to the
| challenge.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
| usr1106 wrote:
| I would claim that something 50% of the application developers
| writing code for Nokia (internal or contractors) could not
| handle strings correctly. It was in theory C++ code, but
| because compilers were not very good at the time when EPOC32
| was developed and memory was pretty limited there were special
| implementations to work around all the limitations. Programming
| was not easy, productivity was low, and buggy application code
| was the norm.
|
| I vaguely remember in the very late days there might have been
| some simplifications, but the train had gone already at that
| time.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Didn't Symbian Ed up using a version of CodeWarrior?
| Unfortunately, a Windows version of memory serves.
| teknolog wrote:
| They did for a long time, but they eventually switched to
| an Eclipse based system. I believe there was a Nokia team
| in Dallas that built that.
| usr1106 wrote:
| First it was Visual Studio, second CodeWarrior and then
| obviously Eclipse (I probably never used the latter,
| jumped ship a couple of years before the infamous burning
| platform.) So every 3-5 years they changed the
| development environment. Can probably also seen as a sign
| that Symbian development was tedious and not much fun.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Maybe I'm remembering wrong but didn't the iPhone not have
| multitasking for apps for a long time as well. I recall that
| essentially the OS did something like a snapshot of every app
| when one switched.
| baybal2 wrote:
| pjmlp wrote:
| I was on the Networks side between 2004 and 20011.
|
| I painfully remember all the hoops that Symbian went through
| during those years until the last days of Carbide.
|
| Yet, sometimes I still miss it when comparing with NDK
| development experience on Android.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > a windows port of the GNU toolchain, so it would only work on
| windows. But even on windows it had a lot of warts (because
| these tools were build for unix in the first place, so e.g.
| drive letters and back slashes were problematic).
|
| About a decade ago I worked on a project for a South Korean
| cellphone vendor whose name I'll not cite for somewhat obvious
| reasons. The build system was similar to what you describe: a
| poor port of unix tools for windows that required windows xp
| which was already obsolete in 2011. I asked why don't we use
| linux since the build was probably more adequate for that
| environment. The answer was something like "because they spent
| a lot of money and time to make this port so we can use
| windows." Korea was mostly a windows-only country at the time.
| They had to change because of android, but for them it seemed
| already too little too late.
| melony wrote:
| Is Odin still a thing?
| 3boll wrote:
| Yep, but a bit out of date...
|
| https://www.odinflash.com/odinchangelog
| marcodiego wrote:
| I don't know. Last time I re-imaged a Samsung phone, I used
| Heimdall[1]. It is open source and runs on linux.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall
| heurisko wrote:
| It works well, compiled and used it last week.
|
| LineageOS said it was out of date, but it worked for me
| on Ubuntu 22.04.
| sonicggg wrote:
| Now that nobody cares about this crap anymore, they release the
| source code.
| distances wrote:
| Symbian was open sourced in 2010.
| https://www.wired.com/2010/02/symbian-operating-system-
| now-o...
| zamalek wrote:
| Wow. I did a quick random sample of their code and it's _really_
| clean, which is especially impressive in the bare-metal domain.
| miohtama wrote:
| Here are the release notes for Symbian kernel
|
| https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.os.kernelhwsrv/b...
|
| 1998 - 2010
| HidyBush wrote:
| If anyone's interested here's [0] a Mediafire archive of Symbian
| developer sources of all kinds, from compilers and SDKs to
| manuals.
|
| [0]
| https://www.mediafire.com/folder/79jhy594xb3uk/Symbian_Devel...
| secondcoming wrote:
| Don't forget to `abld reallyclean`!
| anta40 wrote:
| Thanks. I wish I knew about these back to high school days
| 2001. Instead, I learnt J2ME and.... weill still a Java dev
| until today :p
| distances wrote:
| For what it's worth, I took a mobile software dev course in
| University, and it targeted mainly Symbian. I learned that I
| definitely do not want to do that. It was a painful
| experience.
|
| I ended up doing mobile development anyway, but not until Qt
| was a viable option for Symbian.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Any way to get those onto archive.org?
| doppioandante wrote:
| Thank you, this is _gold_. I have discovered a couple of nokia
| phones in my drawer and I was wondering how the hell I could
| develop on them. Since then I have discovered the whole
| "cooked ROM" scene, which has of course died in the meantime. I
| hope that archive will answer my questions. Btw, if anyone
| knows, is a special piece of hardware needed to flash the
| firmware of a nokia symbian phone?
| secondcoming wrote:
| Symbian devs had their own flashing stations/cradles but at
| some point it became possible to flash newer phones over USB.
| The software tool was called Phoenix and used regularly be
| leaked.
| cja wrote:
| Repo seems to contain personal data of employees. I won't post a
| link to it.
| magicloop wrote:
| Great to see the code up there on GitHub. So many cogent points
| made here. It brings it all back to me. What happened there from
| Symbian to Nokia and then Accenture ought to be taught in MBA
| programmes as a Greek tragedy.
| antiverse wrote:
| For anyone wanting to play Nokia N-Gage games (S60? I forget),
| there is already a lengthy walkthrough and setup of how to
| emulate the games on Windows that is available on The Internet
| Archive; complete with a torrent/zip of all the games on the
| system.
| unlivingthing wrote:
| Links, please. (:
| networked wrote:
| No LICENSE files. Is this official or a leak?
| bobajeff wrote:
| Pretty sure these are from when they open sourced it in an
| attempt to drive adoption.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| I just looked at a couple of the files, it looks like license
| info is inline
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Fond memories of running my day to day (email, diary, expenses,
| task management) of a Psion 3a with 3xAA batteries and a
| modem/cable to my Nokia mobile.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| My first smartphone was a Nokia running Symbian.
| protomyth wrote:
| Is it all licensed as Eclipse Public License v1.0?
| substation13 wrote:
| Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many
| hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see
| the pieces out in the open though.
| t_mann wrote:
| I vaguely recall Symbian being adopted/developed(?) by Nokia.
| It's incredible how early Symbian was, but what's most
| remarkable is that it wasn't even Nokia's only shot at a
| smartphone OS, they also had Maemo.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| It's a shame Nokia is now throwing away everything they know
| about Symbian. The new nokia OS is shockingly crap. Some
| functions straight out don't work and other functions such as
| T9 text are awful. It's a shame when you realise that their
| old Symbian phones work perfectly well and there was no need
| to change it.
| dancek wrote:
| The even older DCT3 generation of Nokia phones worked much
| better than Symbian ever did. Nokia 6210 is still a great
| phone if you only need to call and receive SMS. But
| anything with a color display from that era is really
| showing its age by now.
| distances wrote:
| Nokia hasn't been making phones for a long time. They
| license the name for HMD Global and the modern devices have
| nothing to do with Nokia itself.
| cortesoft wrote:
| It is the destiny for most code written.
| whartung wrote:
| Anyone who has been in this business for any length of time
| will look back at a long legacy of retired, obsolete
| projects. Very little in this space lasts. The high profile,
| long lived projects we see are just an tiny fraction of the
| software that's created, used, forgotten, and deleted.
|
| I like to look back and note some of the companies I helped
| in that little window of time I could contribute, but those
| contributions are long gone.
|
| We don't build bridges in this business, thats for sure.
| mulmen wrote:
| I have friends who ask me how to set their kids on a path
| to a tech career like mine. I tell them they may not want
| that at all. This is a good job, _today_. But I don 't
| think it is so different from building pickup trucks in
| Detroit in the 1960s. Nothing lasts forever. Including
| those trucks, and those jobs. We can't know the future,
| only that change is inevitable.
|
| Software Manufacturing is a term that best captures my
| impression of the industry today.
| fps_doug wrote:
| Especially if it's something you used and liked. But yes, I'm a
| big fan of releasing these things to the public, for archival
| and for the curious. It's crazy how even big companies lose
| source code of old software, or at least only have it
| accessible in a completely chaotic state, with a missing build
| system, missing instructions, etc. Recent example would be 3D
| Movie Maker by Microsoft. People got it to compile eventually,
| but it apparently was a wild undertaking:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXTzlDZmhU
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtKHPwTWsc
| danuker wrote:
| Indeed. Every time someone builds a walled garden, effort is
| duplicated needlessly, both in building it, and in using it.
| nomoreusernames wrote:
| im still using workbench.
| atleta wrote:
| Quite a few of those hours were wasted and contributed to
| Nokia's demise. They should have switched away from Symbian
| waaay sooner. I think clinging to it is a classic case of the
| sunken cost fallacy. By ~2005-2006 it was obvious, at least for
| some of us, developers, that continuing to invest in Symbian is
| a huge mistake.
|
| By then, Nokia had been working on a Linux based OS for years.
| (That would become Meego.) But, if I'm not mistaken, at least a
| thousand people were working on Symbian and Symbian based
| products. So switching away from it was simply out of question.
| It would have been too bold a move. (Especially, since Nokia
| was dominating the market and these products brought in a very
| nice profit.)
| kjellsbells wrote:
| wasnt this pain the premise of the infamous "burning
| platform" memo [1] and the eventual switch to Windows Phone
| as an OS?
|
| [1] https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen-
| elops...
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Nokia earned billions from this code. I bet those hours were
| paid back many times over.
| usr1106 wrote:
| No, they probably didn't earn billions from that code. Their
| biggest cash cows were feature phones (non-Symbian) that sold
| 10-50 times as many as Symbian phones and were developed with
| many times smaller budgets. While some Symbian phones were
| pretty good for their area, there were probably at least as
| many failed projects as successful ones.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| I don't have any data to back this up, but I think they
| sold hundreds of millions of high end (and expensive for
| the time) smartphones running Symbian. Remember the N line?
| The E line? Communicators? All running Symbian, all
| bestsellers for years.
| usr1106 wrote:
| No, I remember attending parties when 1 or 2 millions of
| a model had been sold. At the same time Nokia sold over
| 100 million of feature phones a year.
|
| Edit:
|
| As you write they were expensive. So while Nokia was the
| undisputd leader in the segment for a couple of years the
| absolute numbers were not that big. I remember some year
| the worldwide phone market was 400 million a year. Nokia
| had over 100 million of them, but smart phones (Symbian)
| only single digit millions.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| One model, N95, sold 10 million units. It was priced at
| around $500. That's 5 billion revenue from one model
| alone. I'm sure feature phones sold a lot more, but
| that's irrelevant.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Yes, 10 millions for the N95 sound possible to me. But
| that was after 10 years of development with many 1000
| developers. Revenue is not earnings. The orginal claim
| was that they earned billions.
| markb139 wrote:
| Just before the iPhone, I think Nokia were shipping about
| 70 million Symbian phones a 1/4 and had about 50% of the
| market profit. Then, it didn't
| [deleted]
| spyremeown wrote:
| Not really... it had its use. Code vanishes so quickly.
| pavlov wrote:
| Symbian, the Ozymandias of smartphone operating systems.
|
| They had a lot of the right ideas very early. They started
| building a high-resolution graphical mobile OS for 32-bit ARM
| in the mid-1990s, when most phones barely could display two
| lines of text and receive an SMS. Many concepts in iOS and
| Android today were pioneered by Symbian.
|
| IMO, the biggest failing of Symbian was to disown the UI and
| focus on the lower layers of the operating system. Symbian's
| licensees like Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson wanted to
| control the GUI layer themselves, so they had annoyingly
| incompatible GUI libraries for Symbian. The platform was
| already hard to develop for, and then you had multiple vendors
| piling gunk on top like Nokia's Series 60 which was a terrible
| piece of work.
|
| In a parellel universe Symbian would have acquired the BeOS
| team in 2003 and kept them in Silicon Valley, tasked with
| building a truly excellent mobile GUI on a five-year time
| horizon independent of Nokia's meddling. A well-designed high-
| level UI framework in a reasonable language could have made the
| embedded C++ underpinnings of Symbian mostly irrelevant --
| basically shipping Android a couple of years before the fact.
| msh wrote:
| I think as long as it was companies like nokia who liked to
| create smartphones that where primarily phones with texting
| first and computers a very distant second Symbian did not
| have a chance.
|
| I know that they made stuff like the 9x00 communicators but
| they where never intended as mass market products.
|
| Nokia was never able to craft a desirable product that
| brought applications to the mainstream user, most people who
| got their smartphones only used them as phones.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Third-party apps for Symbian may not have been mainstream,
| but third-party games definitely were. Even before that,
| Java ME games were popular on feature phones.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias
| ff317 wrote:
| Also one of several instances where the Breaking Bad
| writers put a lot of thought into amazing episode themes
| and titles:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)
| orev wrote:
| Before the iPhone, mobile device companies were held ransom
| by wireless carriers. Carriers dictated _everything_ about
| the phones, down the Verizon demanding Bluetooth file
| transfer was disabled to force people to use data minutes to
| send pictures.
|
| This is one of the things that I think modern techies have
| forgotten. No matter what you think of Apple, they were the
| only ones with enough market power to force carriers out of
| that position (Apple having been newly minted at the king of
| digital music) . It's why the iPhone was exclusive to AT&T --
| because Verizon was the market leader and AT&T _had_ to make
| the deal to get the iPhone. And Jobs wouldn't make the deal
| with any carrier that insisted on adding crapware to the
| phone.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| This was true in the US. I don't know about Europe. But it
| wasn't true anywhere else. Even in the US it was dominated
| by Motorola (and BB) as a result. Motorola didn't have much
| success outside of Razr in the rest of the world and Nokia
| and Sony didn't have much success in the US. So it was
| really a tale of two worlds. I really liked the Sonys and
| Nokias of the era.
|
| Symbian didn't screw up the UI and it certainly was "too
| open". It was so common to have malware and viruses on
| nokia phones. Bluetooth was scary.
|
| The biggest issue of all was the incompatible app
| ecosystem. Each phone and OS and sometimes even models were
| different. Some were Java, others were Symbian and then the
| whole world of blackberries and windows.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > was so common to have malware and viruses on nokia
| phones
|
| I never experienced that and don't know anyone who did.
| Was it really a thing?
| miohtama wrote:
| I don't think this is true. I worked extensively in the
| mobile industry back in the day and all Nokia apps had
| more painful signing process than iOS apps have today.
| distances wrote:
| It was not true in Europe either. You could of course use
| any device, and in many countries bundling a device with
| a phone contract was even expressly forbidden. Carriers
| had no control at all.
|
| Insert the usual disclaimer that Europe has a lot of
| countries with different legislation, but the carrier
| stranglehold was a US specific problem.
| pmontra wrote:
| I've been working for a carrier in Italy in the first
| half of 2000s. We designed some phones with manufacturers
| but any phone could work on our network AFAIK. There was
| not much choice at the beginning because we only had a 3G
| network and there were very few 3G phones (only one at
| launch.)
| teknolog wrote:
| Heh. Worked on that in a previous life.
| crb wrote:
| 'sup seb
| umarniz wrote:
| Symbian was the era that trains you to never be afraid of
| debugging the hardest problems and understand how big of a
| blessing documentation is.
|
| A few examples of my childhood experiences making a game for
| Symbian:
|
| 1) Debugging that one problem which would cause the whole OS to
| crash
|
| The crash log didn't help cause it wouldn't flush the logs to
| disk in time. My under developed concepts of multi-threading
| didn't help much either not that I know much more today 10 years
| later.
|
| 2) Overriding OS memory safety to read accelerometer data from
| memory in phones that didn't have APIs for it
|
| The patience and creative thinking you learn tackling with such
| high levels of uncertainty and painful problems is incredible.
|
| I am not aware of how engineers learn engineering (I am self
| taught) but this kind of patience and endurance does shape a lot
| of my engineering skills today.
| abcd_f wrote:
| Earlier Windows versions shipped with the same wonderful
| developer experience. My favourite was a bool API function
| returning 2 under certain circumstances that you'd better be
| aware of.
|
| And by "earlier" I mean from Win 3.1 and up to W8 era or
| thereabouts, when the documentation finally started to improve.
| grishka wrote:
| Oh, cool. I remember trying to write native apps for my Nokia
| 5800 and the SDK being... not very good. Also I lacked experience
| and a sufficiently powerful computer. Also I don't think the
| thing was documented much, either that or I didn't know where to
| look for the docs. And the bizarre class naming scheme. And the
| bizarre dozen types of strings. And the most bizarre custom error
| handling mechanism (iirc it was called "leave") instead of C++
| exceptions.
|
| I do wonder if this code is enough to build a working firmware
| image for a Nokia phone, but most probably some of the required
| parts are missing.
| rhubarbtse wrote:
| It is not, unfortunately. It's missing plenty of proprietary
| middleware etc that you need to run it on Nokia phones.
|
| IIRC you are supposedly able to build and run this source dump
| on some BeagleBoard.
|
| I was there, coding multimedia stuff for the last generation of
| Symbian smartphones. I remember this dump was originally
| released on Gitorious (later acquired by GitLab) some 10++
| years ago.
|
| Fun fact: the source was originally supposed to be licensed
| under a different roll-your-own open source license (I think it
| was named "Symbian Foundation License" or something like that)
| but Nokia switched to Eclipse Public License 1.0 before the
| public release.
| pm2222 wrote:
| This reminds me of those android tv boxes. Their spec is pretty
| good to run linux. Is there generic way to convert them to say
| arch/ubuntu linux?
| deno wrote:
| I've played some with those and it's not pretty. It's all the
| pain you get with commercial SBCs except: even less support,
| much lower quality hardware, and terrible thermal solutions
| (ventilation holes under the case with no feet and tiny/non-
| existent heatsinks).
|
| In the end what killed my interest in them is that the cheapest
| you can get those is like 30 USD and for that price you can
| also get X86 thin clients that are just better in every single
| way.
|
| Still, if you want to get your feet wet I suggest you start
| with RK3318. Those boards are much harder to brick than AmLogic
| and are the only ones with at least some support from Armbian:
| https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17597-csc-armbian-for-rk3318...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If they can be boot-unlocked and run a custom ROM, you could
| look into supporting them under postmarketOS. That's the
| closest we get to a clean Linux install on AOSP-native devices.
| lproven wrote:
| I think you will need to be specific. Which particular
| make/model do you have in mind? Have you looked to see if
| someone's already done it?
| tjstankus wrote:
| Wow, memory lane here. My first programming job was working on
| Symbian apps. I think I had a 1MB heap and something like an 8KB
| stack to work with. Good times!
| kevsim wrote:
| Spent some time at Nokia when I was fresh out of university. The
| thrill of getting "hello world" on the screen in Symbian/S60 is
| not something I'll ever forget. Took ages of battling CodeWarrior
| and I think even a simple app was something like 6 files, but
| seeing code I wrote running on a phone in 2004 was pretty
| awesome.
| ingenieroariel wrote:
| "Battling CodeWarrior": back when N95 was exciting to mention.
| secondcoming wrote:
| The moved on from CodeWarrior to Carbide, which was based on
| Eclipse.
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