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PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

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Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#101

Post by g19fanatic »

frellus wrote: post #37

Nothing made me feel older than going to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA and seeing a Palm Pilot in the display case. It should be illegal to show things which were an integral part of your life, a short 30'ish years ago, as if they were uncovered in the ruins of some pre-civilization. Not fair at all.

the Museum of Science and Technology (MOST) in Syracuse has a display regarding the history and tech of cell phones. Our children were also incredulous that the nokia brick was what passed as our first cell phones.

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#102

Post by lxgr »

anthk wrote: post #98
lxgr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudpilot is amazing, one of the most sophisticated PWAs I'm aware of! I haven't heard of Vexed, but for me, bringing back Space Trader made me very happy.

You can play it freely (as in Freedom) under Android: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.brucelet.spacetrader/

Ah yes, I think I even bought that at some point (didn't realize there was a free build on F-Droid!), but part of the nostalgic appeal to me are the native Palm OS UI widgets and buzzer sounds :)

Compiling Space Trader for Palm OS (it was open source too) was actually something I've repeatedly tried in the early 2000s but unfortunately never managed to pull it off – CodeWarrior was way out of my pocket money budget at the time, and I couldn't figure out how to do it using gcc and PilRC.

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#103

Post by lxgr »

finaard wrote: post #81
wpietri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did have the Treo line! Thank you for mentioning it. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about how Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. I had a series of Treos starting with the Treo 270: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_270 As somebody who carried a Palm for years, it was so amazing to suddenly have the internet in my pocket. It still is, really.

With the Centro it was pretty amazing when they dropped a maps application later on - as it didn't have GPS. In built up areas they managed pretty impressive accuracy just by cell tower triangulation.

I'm very split about the Centro. I used one for a while, but after years of Symbian phones, I just couldn't get over how poor the hardware and how dated the OS were in comparison, even though having all of my old Palm OS applications on my phone was great.

Nokia's N-series had GPS, Wi-Fi, and good cameras years before that and it was hard to lose all of that; Symbian had proper multitasking, persistent storage, and Unicode support; and between native Symbian and J2ME apps, the software ecosystem wasn't half bad either.

Aesthetically, I'll always be a fan of Palm OS, but I couldn't bring myself to actually use it as a daily driver due to all of these limitations.

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#104

Post by lxgr »

jawngee wrote: post #93
wpietri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They did have the Treo line! Thank you for mentioning it. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about how Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. I had a series of Treos starting with the Treo 270: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_270 As somebody who carried a Palm for years, it was so amazing to suddenly have the internet in my pocket. It still is, really.

Palm 5x with OmniSky modem! I can't count how many useless WAP development conferences my company sent me to.

Speaking of WAP, I actually found Palm.net very interesting.

Unfortunately, the Palm VII was only available in the US, and having to dial up via serial cable or infrared using a mobile phone kind of ruined the spontaneous information lookup aspect of it.

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#105

Post by nottorp »

lproven wrote: post #94
DXXTHLOVESU wrote: post #63

So palm OS was an old mobile operating system, introduced around 1996, coded in C++... later extended to support smartphones? Can someone please explain more to me about this OS as it seems pretty interesting, and I have never heard of it.

https://gprivate.com/6ahva

Who has the guts to click on that? :)

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#106

Post by cpeterso »

kalleboo wrote: post #90
Tor3 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, in any case, Japan had tons of what should be considered early smartphones. I was astonished the first time I saw one (and this was obviously before the iPhone). For some reason the iPhone managed to kill off the local Japanese industry though. Japan youngsters (and not only youngsters) are very fashion-oriented, which had more to do with the change than anything else.

The problem was the UI on the Japanese smartphones was completely unusable. Just how to go back to the previous menu differed between the different functions. I was there, I migrated my mother-in-law from her “galakei” to an iPhone. She went from barely even being able to take a picture (there was a dialog after each photo asking where to save it!! Wtf) to instant messaging and playing Pokémon Go.

I hadn’t heard of Galakei (“Galapagos phones”) before. This article has some history and device breakdown and screenshots:

https://www.rappler.com/technology/features/95144-keitai-jap...

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#107

Post by bonyt »

tensor wrote: post #9

I remember investing in Palm thinking that they'd eventually be the ones to build something like the iphone. Sadly, they didn't and when apple did that was it for them.

I've heard blame partially put on carriers - they initially resisted even carrying the Treo line without putting limits on what Handspring could do with it.

Apple had the iPod - and, crucially, customers - could bring these customers to the carriers, and so they could dictate more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9_Vh9h3Ohw (the part I'm referencing is about 20 minutes in).

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#108

Post by AstroJetson »

smm11 wrote: post #34
AstroJetson wrote: post #25

I was a Sprint customer from the start of the Palm phone era. Up until 2 years ago I was using colored Treo’s for my phone. I loved that mechanical keyboard it was so nice to use. ( I have slightly deformed fingers that make it hard for touch screens.). Merger with T-M killed the radio part. So sad to see it go.

I think I used to work with you. You stated the Pre was the "iPhone killer" about six months after the iPhone came out, and Android phones appeared. You showed our deparment's first iPhone user the non-awesome stuff the Pre did by comparison, then stated that Palm's millions of users would show me. They sure did.

Nope, I was the guy that had Palm Pilots, got my whole Architecture group Palm pilots and we used to beam messages at each other in meetings. I became good at graffiti writing, my printing today looks like it. The Palm phones was a natural extension of that.

My first one was the 180 model, with the flip front cover. I did a quick check, I had my first Palm Phone in 2002-3, iPhones came out in 2007.

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#109

Post by Someone »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #71
xmm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic MacOS did, but it's definitely not something needed for multitasking without an MMU. For instance AmigaOS didn't do this, but instead effectively had a single shared heap.

Mac OS, Win16, PalmOS all have shared heaps too. This is precisely why you need defragmentation (after an application quits, the heap is a fragmented mess, full of holes) and therefore some system so that the other applications keep "movable handles" to heap blocks instead of raw pointers (which would become invalid after the heap undergoes one round of defragmentatino). If an OS does not do this you are basically in…

> Mac OS, Win16, PalmOS all have shared heaps too

Mac OS didn’t. It had a system heap and a heap for the running application. Once it supported running multiple applications simultaneously, each of them had its own heap (https://www.folklore.org/Switcher.html: “One fundamental decision was whether or not to load all of the applications into a single heap, which would make optimal use of memory by minimizing fragmentation, or to allocate separate "heap zones" for each application. I decided to opt for separate heap zones to better isolate the applications, but I wasn't sure that was right.”)

That’s why MultiFinder had to know how much RAM to give to each application. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiFinder#MultiFinder: “MultiFinder also provides a way for applications to supply their memory requirements ahead of time, so that MultiFinder can allocate a chunk of RAM to each according to need” (Wikipedia doesn’t mention it, but MultiFinder also allowed users to increase those settings)

Re: PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

#110

Post by angst_ridden »

thot_experiment wrote: post #26

So hype to lose some hours playing Space Trader. I had a Palm Vx in middle school and I have some very fond memories of playing that game under my desk in class.

I worked with Peter Spronck and created the last add-ons and a few quests to Space Trader (e.g. The Scarab). I miss those days!
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