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Symbian Source Code

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Re: Symbian Source Code

#131

Post by mc_woods »

I worked on Symbian aka EPOC around the early to mid 2000. Trips down to London to visit their offices. I'm still connected to some of the guys on Facebook from that time.

It was one of my first roles outside of Uni, boy getting exposed to everything from low level system software and kernels to application development, and API creation. I learnt so much. Much of which, in principle is still valid.

I learnt a lot from the other developers and engineers a met.

Remember sitting a room with David Wood, where we talked through the creation of a book about Python development / entry level development on the platform. I still recall David's view that we should use the best, easiest, and also most expensive tooling in the book. But that seemed to lock so many people out of the ecosystem.

Anyway - to many memories, and so much I learnt. Meeting PhDs, and Grads today who struggle with how C/C++ works, I'm really lucky I got the chance to work on it when I did. And now I've a craving for a Series 5mx... ebay here I come...

Re: Symbian Source Code

#132

Post by ryukoposting »

marcodiego wrote: post #111
rollcat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

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.

In short, be the change you wish to see in the world. If you want there to be a viable competitor to Chrome, use Firefox. If you want there to be a viable competitor to Apple and Google (and you have the cash), buy a Librem 5. The alternatives are out there, begging to be used.

As an active developer in a programming language with a small ecosystem, I scream this to the clouds all day: great software doesn't become well-supported until somebody has the gall to use it.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#133

Post by numpad0 »

epolanski wrote: post #128
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…

There are different markets than US and phones aren't only sold by carriers. Even admitting what you say in US is true, it definitely was not in Europe or Asia thus I doubt any of your analysis of carriers impacting the tech.

It was a huge problem in Japan, South Korea and to lesser extent, the US. Japanese phone industry conformed to it but bled to death soon after iPhone happened.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#134

Post by AceJohnny2 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #112
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…

> 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 o…

In fact, Symbian was using an "active object" design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_object_(Symbian_OS)

Re: Symbian Source Code

#136

Post by atleta »

kjellsbells wrote: post #126
atleta wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

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...

Maybe. But by then (2011 IIRC) it was way too late, sales had been going South, so one wouldn't need too much of a genius to figure out that Symbian was dead.

The problem was that in the mid 2000s things were going just too good and management didn't want to see how it could become problematic, or at least take the risk. We were selling smart phones, that weren't really phones anymore (heck, we called them mobile terminals!) but it was pretty hard and painful to develop software for these. This made hard to convince external, indie/hobbist developers (they ended up creating most of the apps for ios and android) and, of course made internal development pretty expensive. Worse, it must have made experimenting and thus innovation slow. Hence the UI was stuck. Not as if Nokia ever put too much effort into innovating the UI. Touch screens were somewhat frowned upon. Though that may in part have related to the existing UI, the effort needed to try out something new and the fact that those touch screens were still resistive back then. Which is really not a great UX.

Though I remember once trying a prototype phone at an internal conference with a touch screen providing haptic feedback (through some piezo efect). So you could kind of feel the on-screen buttons.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#137

Post by dietrichepp »

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…

The build system sounds eerily familiar to one I used at a previous job.

There was a "gmake" and "cmake", one of them written in Perl and one written in shell, which wrapped make on a Windows port of the GNU toolchain, and the makefiles were generated (as far as I can tell) using Make as a scripting language. Hard-coded drive letters, company-internal packaging systems, Cygwin mount points, multiple terminal windows, etc. The build system dated back a couple decades and was ported from Unix.

If you tracked down the actual rules that Make executed, you'd find something like this:

    $(TARGET_1): $(DEPS_1)
        $(RECIPE_1)
Copy/pasted a hundred times.

I have no idea of the actual history for this software. Few teams used it. I can only imagine that it was slowly modified, over decades, by people who did not understand the system that they were modifying. By this point in history computers were plenty fast and had plenty of memory, so I can only imagine how much of a pain it must have been to work with back in the 1990s. During the short time I was there, I managed to reduce the build time by a factor of about 100x, there were so many easy opportunities for improvement. I heard from someone who still works there that my improvements were removed, which doesn't surprise me at all--after all, I wasn't there to support those improvements.

At some point I realized that I was cleaning up bugs introduced by other members of the team, and I was on the losing side. My direct manager had almost zero knowledge of software engineering, as far as I could tell (only seniority & some domain expertise). Some other people on the team were figuring out how to provide proper support, and a couple others were doing stuff with Node.js.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#138

Post by phendrenad2 »

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…

Wow making an employee sign an NDA! How did they realize that the employment contract probably already covered all of the legal angles? Seems like pointless internal gatekeeping and infighting. No wonder the project was crushed by Android.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#139

Post by markmark »

oofbey wrote: post #91

Looking through some of this code is a painful reminder of the time when lots of people thought XML was a good idea. " operand2="2" datatype="int"/> instead of numberofjobs = NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS 2 Talk about a headwind to productivity.

Every time I see the templated yaml used widely in devops (see helm charts for example), I'm reminded of this sort of XML used for declarative programming. It was terrible then and it's terrible now.

Re: Symbian Source Code

#140

Post by dietrichepp »

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…

Worth mentioning the N-Gage, which got a Wordle port recently, powered by SDL2:

https://hackaday.com/2022/04/08/wordle-comes-to-the-nokia-n-...

I remember the N-Gage being lambasted when it came out, but recently I realized that those same people also lambasted the iPod, and maybe I can't trust those people's judgment about tech. You know, the Slashdot crowd.

Maybe it was a good system that was just poorly positioned in the market against the Game Boy Advance. $200 for a phone + gaming system doesn't sound so bad, and the more recent comments I've heard about it are along the lines of "underrated system that was ahead of its time". It was competing against a $100 Game Boy Advance, though.

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