[HN Gopher] Of Psion and Symbian
___________________________________________________________________
Of Psion and Symbian
Author : klelatti
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-06-23 09:02 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| tappaseater wrote:
| When I was just starting my career around the late 1980s, I wrote
| a program on the Psion for a chain store in the UK that had 21
| stores. Basically a person would walk the aisles and enter the
| stock codes and quantities. When they were done they would plug
| the device into a serial device. I wrote this other program in MS
| Basic (DOS) that dialed up all these Psions and downloaded the
| orders into an IBM S/38 Order and Inventory management system. I
| thought I was the dog's. I loved those devices.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Halcyon days ... interesting devices, ideas, and I loved my psion
| 5mx ... I remember hooking up to the internet while waiting in
| line at a concert and thinking I was damned business magnate cum
| console cowboy
|
| I followed the story of Nokia, Symbian and Psion closely after
| that and the whole thing just felt like one of the biggest
| dropped balls in corporate history. Sad ... too many cooks, maybe
| ...
| timellis-smith wrote:
| I found my dad's Psion 5mx in a drawer the other day. They were
| really fantastic devices
| bestham wrote:
| I often think about this article[1] from the Register that claim
| that the Paion MX5 was the last computer built by one team
| hardware and software. [1]:
| https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/26/psion_special/
| lproven wrote:
| Yes, that's a favourite of mine, too, and was before I worked
| there.
| pavlov wrote:
| For some reason I still love the Psion logo with the
| deconstructed letters and the industrial gray-yellow color
| scheme.
|
| Anyway, it's sad that there was such a massive opportunity for
| European corporate players to invent mobile computing, but
| together they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
| in the form of Symbian (the evolution of Psion's operating
| system, co-developed with Nokia and Ericsson).
|
| The other day I was rummaging around papers in the attic, and
| found a black and white printout of an internal Nokia
| presentation from 2001 outlining their smartphone and mobile data
| strategy. It was striking how well they anticipated what users
| might want in the smartphone, but completely failed to project
| the technological milestones that might make those dreams
| realizable. The 2001 outlook was entirely obsessed with the
| limits of bandwidth and what mobile operators would allow on
| their network (i.e. how Nokia could enable operators to get a cut
| on all the content viewed by users).
|
| Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and
| engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data
| here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on. Apple was
| able to project the point where their desktop operating system
| (itself formerly a late-1980s workstation OS) could fit into
| mobile, and they also had the design capability to ruthlessly cut
| features to make that work. Nokia dabbled in all directions:
| bottom-up with Symbian, top-down with Maemo/Meego, but no
| commitment and no guiding vision except the managerial focus on
| cutting costs by putting the same old components a bit more
| cheaply into a growing range of colorful plastics.
| veeti wrote:
| "Pocket Terminal 2002": https://imgur.com/gallery/pocket-
| terminal-2002-r2sq4i0
| kmac_ wrote:
| Nokia not only missed what users wanted but also how developers
| would like to work. Symbian had a strange and easy-to-misuse
| API, poor manuals, and app deployments were tied to telecom
| operators as there was no app store. I remember my ramp-up as a
| developer with the Apple ecosystem after working with Symbian.
| It wasn't evolution; it was like a leap to the next century.
| The documentation was excellent, the APIs were clear and
| logical, the code made sense, and the system was familiar. And
| then the App Store arrived with all the implications, such as a
| sudden mass market and less-obvious features like crash reports
| with stack traces from users. Apple was on an entirely
| different level than Nokia, and literally not a single
| developer wanted to touch Symbian anymore. It was effectively
| dead, even with millions of devices still in use, but it was
| obvious. Today I see a similar story unfolding, much more
| slowly, but the same thing is happening with Microsoft Windows.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I was in Espoo HQ, the week after the burning platform memo,
| which killed most developer love that was worked on during
| the previous years building up to Qt and PIPS.
|
| Everyone I talked to wasn't that happy with management.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Meanwhile marketing made sure everything looked fine on the
| outside, still recruiting app developers to the platform
| they were planning on abandoning.
|
| Wasted 2 years on that bitter, bitter lesson followed by
| prolonged depression.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sorry about that, I was on the Networks unit, still I
| could follow most of the Mobile stuff from inside.
|
| After the Metrowerks based, tooling, there were two
| attempts with Eclipse, the first wasn't that great and I
| no longer remember the name, the second one was Carbide.
|
| Which is when then eventually acquired Qt, introduced
| PIPS to ease the pain, and started to make Symbian C++
| dialect more friendlier, and closer to common programming
| without those strange two phase constructors, handles,
| and special suffix names on member functions.
|
| So the community was starting to see the light of
| transition that was several years in the making, and out
| of the sudden, that "we are going Windows Phone 7" on a
| company that was UNIX first for several years.
|
| When I joined, all network software was originally
| targeting HP-UX, for example.
|
| So there wasn't much Microsoft love on the corridors.
| distances wrote:
| That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of
| the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to
| improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in
| the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well
| ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware
| accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.
| toyg wrote:
| At managerial level, only half of Nokia was onboard with
| Qt. The other half wanted to chuck everything and just
| adopt something developed elsewhere; I reckon most of these
| folks simply resented the size the company had reached, and
| wanted to streamline. The latter half won the political
| battle and brought Elop in to do the dirty work.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The problem was that right after the Symbian developer
| community decided to embrace Qt, the Burning Platform memo
| came out, telling them to dump C++, learn C# and target
| Windows Phone 7, with either Silverligh or XNA.
|
| In a community that was largety anti-Microsoft, joking how
| bad Windows CE and Pocket PC used to be, versus Symbian
| handsets.
|
| The majority of the Symbian community felt betrayed and
| went elsewhere, to Apple and Google.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| It's always amuses me how people blame Elop, completely
| ignoring everything what was done before him.
|
| >> No. You should re-read that memo, specifically
| starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+
| price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61
| percent." paragraph.
|
| >> In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else
| made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for
| Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian
| shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would
| move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone
| market? Money was in Apple and Android.
|
| >> _Should I remind you what Elop 's memo was a month
| later, in February 2011?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979
| dash2 wrote:
| Windows is being replaced by Apple? Or doing the replacing?
| pavlov wrote:
| Native Windows was replaced by the web and Electron-style
| wrappers long ago.
| ukuina wrote:
| Even many Windows-exclusive apps are wrapped now; see:
| Cortana, Copilot
| twoodfin wrote:
| _Post-iPhone, it seems silly that they spent so much energy and
| engineering effort on shaving off a few kilobytes of 3G data
| here, squeezing apps into 1 MB RAM there, and so on._
|
| From what I learned in _Losing the Signal_ , a great history of
| RIM/Blackberry, their engineering leadership had the same
| obsession. They were convinced the iPhone would crash any
| network it was on. To be fair, Cingular/AT&T had plenty of
| teething troubles, but the product was so compelling and
| popular, the market for bandwidth adjusted.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once.
|
| The system was extremely efficient on low-powered machines (by
| which I mean both a slow CPU and a weak battery). As far as
| wringing maximum performance from hardware-that-be, I have never
| worked with a better system.
|
| The learning curve of the API was insane, though (and the system
| dragged a lot of ancient pre-32-bit PSION/EPOC remnants within
| itself). So was the heterogenity of the devices. Every new device
| required some rewrite of existing apps, and Nokia pushed out
| dozens of them. On-device debugging mostly didn't work. Emulators
| were clumsy and bloated, but still lacked important APIs, such as
| sound.
|
| At the end of the day, the system was so developer-unfriendly
| that everyone migrated happily to better pastures.
| tarasglek wrote:
| It was the most robust way to write c++.
|
| Ownership model in Symbian lead to really good memory
| efficiency. The testing tools made it really hard to import
| open source code cos it brought out all the memory correctness
| issues in addition to the usual porting problems. This was the
| safest systems code before rust came along.
|
| Most devs did not understand that it was a "take your medicine
| for healthier code" situation and hated the dev experience
| Someone wrote:
| > I wrote a lot of code for Symbian devices once.
|
| I sympathize with you. The learning curve of the API indeed was
| insane. For example, here's a description of its at least 8
| different string classes (the intro mentions 7, but doesn't
| mention RBuf) that you had to know about:
| https://www.developer.com/mobile/mastering-symbian-os-descri...
| (and that's way better documentation than I remember seeing at
| the time)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Bringing in Qt, and PIPS (P.I.P.S. Is POSIX on Symbian OS), in
| a Eclipse based IDE (Carbide), helped make the development
| experience much better, but then came Elop and ruined
| everything, with management's board help.
| thesimp wrote:
| I started with a Psion 3 and later a Psion 5MX and now 30 years
| later I still remember how good the user experience was. The
| agenda, de contact database, the way you could make your own
| database with data that you wanted to lookup while on the move,
| it all just worked. At some point in time I even had a mapping
| tool, I think the precursor to what is now TomTom.
|
| Personally I think that today an only iphone/macbook with just
| the default software (mail/contacts/calendar/etc) comes somewhat
| close to the same user experience. A Windows machine, while
| having a million different programs available at your fingertips,
| does not feel as a cohesive user experience.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| That would have been Autoroute. Written in the UK, the software
| house, Nextbase, was bought by Microsoft in 1993/94 and the
| Psion release was called "Microsoft Automap" - the only
| Microsoft release for that platform!
| secondcoming wrote:
| > Symbian operated as a consultancy where they could take a
| reference design and adapt it to a customer's hardware and give
| it a unique look and feel
|
| If the author is referring to what I think he his, it was only a
| certain part of Symbian that did this. No other Symbian employees
| had access to that part of the building. Normal Symbian employees
| never actually got to see the phones that were being developed.
| All work their was done on an emulator (x86) and H2/H4 (armv5)
| reference boards.
|
| This book details the politics that went on until the end
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smartphones-beyond-Lessons-remarkab...
| mtekman wrote:
| I got to meet David Potter and his journalist wife when I was
| working at the Royal Free Hospital. He funded the Potter Chair
| position which my prof Dr Kleta filled as a nephrologist for many
| years. I have a picture of myself holding a Nokia N900 and
| shaking his hand.
|
| At the time I thought he was the reason that the phone existed at
| all, not quite knowing the delicate politics between Symbian and
| Maemo at the time.
|
| Still he smiled amicably enough and it's a treasured photo of
| mine.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Oh man, I remember connecting my 5MX to a Nokia slider (the "The
| Matrix phone") via the infrared port. Supreme geekery,
| ridiculously expensive, just to check that POP3 inbox.
| PrimeOS32 wrote:
| I had the 3c and the Revo. The Revo was initially a revelation. I
| paired it with an infrared modem connected to a Nokia that
| enabled me to surf the internet and get driving directions on the
| move 7 years before the iPhone. Alas working with the iMac was a
| pain and the Revo would randomly lose memory due to a power
| system design flaw. At that stage I ditched Revo and Psion for a
| HP WinCE device. More of a downgrade. I purchased the Gemini PDA
| when it came out. It was marvellous but expensive and fragile. I
| now have a DIamond Mako and a 5mx that I play with occasionally.
| In hindsight the best Psion was the 3c. It was affordable, robust
| and just worked. It got stolen on a bus in Chile in '97.
| Otherwise I bet I would still be using it.
| br3d wrote:
| Your experience sounds eerily similar to mine, especially the
| hacky workarounds to preempt smartphones (I peaked when getting
| online by Bluetoothing a Clio to a Sony Ericsson). Your comment
| about the robustness of the 3c reminded me about when mine fell
| out of a pocket when I was cycling and a car drove over it. It
| emerged unscathed.
| eduction wrote:
| > He was aware of both CPU and Sinclair Research, and he called
| them up.
|
| This is one of those sentences that make abortretry.fail articles
| feel slapped together from other sources without attribution. Who
| is "CPU" in this sentence?
|
| Context and a little digging reveals it is likely a reference to
| another early British company in the PC space, Cambridge
| Processor Unit Ltd. , described in the History section of the
| Acorn computer Wikipedia.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
|
| This random reference to a random company never goes anywhere is
| never properly explained in the first place. It gives the feel of
| something that has been quickly adapted by the author without
| much thought or understanding.
| lproven wrote:
| Yes, that struck me, as well.
|
| I think he does a lot of cribbing from Wikipedia and does not
| acknowledge it.
|
| Online a few people have pointed out big holes in this story.
| Small ones, like the Organizer IIXP did not have a backlight:
| no Organizer model had a backlight, nor did the MC or the
| Series 3 or 3A.
|
| No mention of the Odin or Crystal phones.
|
| https://www.oocities.org/epoc_32/odin
|
| No mention of the RIM lawsuit (the Canadians though they'd
| invented email on the move.) No mention of Charles Davies,
| employee #1.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2010/06/25/charles_davies/
|
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270209...
|
| No mention of Psion Xchange running on other 68000 OSes as well
| as QDOS, and on MS-DOS. Little mention of the award-winning
| Psion games and some of the superstar developers.
| dvt wrote:
| I learned how to program on that PSION II! My dad brought one
| back from the UK (must've been '93 or maybe '94) and I got
| hooked. I still have BASIC (or I guess OPL) scribbles from when I
| was like 7 years old in a notepad. Nostalgia overload :)
| johnea wrote:
| A great story from the dawn of the idea to the realization of the
| Nokia SymbianOS phones.
|
| The subsequent M$ purchase of that Nokia phone division was one
| of the biggest damages done by Microsoft to the computing world.
| hawski wrote:
| Sometimes I would like to have a small laptop with black and
| white screen or maybe 8 bit color that would have extreme
| (measured in days) or almost unlimited battery power (solar
| cell?). Something that would have a C compiler for happy hacking,
| though I would like to have a Linux kernel on it. I am not sure
| about connectivity though.
|
| We made huge efficiency and battery chemistry gains, but software
| is lacking. Though it would be probably a quite expensive device
| that only a few want.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You mean something like the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra ?
|
| https://ewritable.com/tablets/onyx-boox-tab-ultra/review/
|
| Not sure about the battery life : since it's one of the higher
| powered e-ink tablets, it can probably only last a few days ?
| hagbard_c wrote:
| I developed a program for the Organiser II which interfaced with
| a light sensor on the expansion port to record "shadow profiles"
| of tree crowns which were used to generate tree health statistics
| for use in forestry. You told the program what species you were
| going to profile, then walked at a regular pace in a straight
| line from one side of the crown shadow to the other and it would
| record a profile to storage, calculate its deviation from the
| average for that species and use that to produce a health score.
| Repeat this for a given number of trees per hectare and it gave
| an indication of the health for that section. All this was based
| on a theory (which I had my doubts about) of one of my professors
| and who better to implement it than the one computer nerd who
| happened to be studying forestry at that university? I don't
| think the scores were all that useful and remote sensing was
| starting to take off anyway but it did give me a chance to work
| with this device. At the same university we used everything from
| PDP-11's, VAXen plus all matter of other DEC hardware - DEC
| Rainbows instead of clones, etc - plus a host of HP stuff. Add
| the Acorn Archimedes a few years later, the Amiga I got for next
| to nothing 'because it did not work' (a single small electrolytic
| capacitor had blown its guts, I had one lying around so a few
| minutes later I had a working Amiga for the price of a good meal.
| I also rebuilt a CGA (digital TTL input) colour monitor I had
| lying around by designing and including an analogue RGB input,
| somewhat to my own amazement it worked just fine) and pretty soon
| I was doing mostly tech stuff.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-23 23:00 UTC)