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Symbian Source Code

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Re: Symbian Source Code

#101

Post by lproven »

markb139 wrote: post #87
lproven wrote: post #38

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: h…

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 :)

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.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#102

Post by exhilaration »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #65
atleta wrote: post #39

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 agr…

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 effo…

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.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#103

Post by gjvc »

lproven wrote: post #38

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: h…

Thank you for that summary (and I have an email in my drafts folder for you! will send it soon, honest :-))

Re: Symbian Source Code

#104

Post by mulmen »

whartung wrote: post #76
cortesoft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the destiny for most code written.

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 contributio…

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.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#106

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

8ytecoder wrote: post #40
orev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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…

> 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?

Re: Symbian Source Code

#107

Post by kerpele »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #51
marcodiego wrote: post #37

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…

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 ni…

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.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#109

Post by teknolog »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #65
atleta wrote: post #39

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 agr…

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 effo…

Sports Tracker was awesome. I used it for years before it stopped being competitive with Strava and more modern offerings.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#110

Post by teknolog »

OnlyMortal wrote: post #96
usr1106 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 applica…

Didn’t Symbian Ed up using a version of CodeWarrior? Unfortunately, a Windows version of memory serves.

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.
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