Back in the day if you wanted to develop for PalmOS you had to pay Metroworks (IIRC) $~300 for their CodeWarrior C++ compiler, so the fact that XCode is free is a pretty big improvement.
We also had prc-tools, a free GCC based toolchain. I used it to build a tweaked version of pssh and some other stuff. It was a lot more straightforward than modern Android or iOS development.
Linux on Mobile was pretty much that. The movement kinda died when Nokia died, but has been seeing a lot of activity again the last couple of years. It's mostly community-maintained projects like postmarketOS.
I find a few things are missing for such an OS to be a daily driver, but there's definitely hope, and there's definitely a place where anyone interested can contribute.
The word used should be “simulates”, not “emulates”.
The software is designed to mimic the look and feel of the old projectionist software (which ran on PP). It does not in any way emulate PalmOS or the PP hardware.
> It does not in any way emulate PalmOS or the PP hardware.
Citation? Here’s IMAX Engineering confirming that it’s emulating a Palm Pilot.
“The original Quick Turn Reel Units operated on Palm Pilots. In advance of the release of Oppenheimer, IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists,” an IMAX spokesperson told Motherboard.
That's not a quote from IMAX engineering. That's a quote from an IMAX spokesperson of what engineering said. And in the game of telephone something is lost along the way. I would guess they meant: IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured a system that emulates the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists. But mixed it up in a way that means something different to us techies.
To skip operator retraining? At least that's how I read team "it's only look and feel, not an emulator". My objection to that would be that a hypothetical outcome of a modern UI with identical menu layout not being good enough would be one of those things that you only ever learn the hard way. But who knows, perhaps it was a new UI that was vetoed out by someone in a very powerful position and then they had to skin it up. But the far more likely explanation is that they had software, were running out of hardware devices to put in projection time until someone tried their hand on running one of the numerous palm emulators in existence on an RPi or similar.
I wonder why they chose Palm, but then why not, and what else would they use? Ipaq?
It's not clear, but I assume it sends commands to the actual film hardware, and its not doing some real-time control.
"The software shows a handful of controls for the projectionist to queue up the film and control the platters that feed film at six feet per second. " [0]
Palm was the market leader, it would have been the obvious choice. Palm had been around since 1996 and by 1998 had sold 30 million devices [1]. PocketPC didn’t come out until 2000, in 2001 they had only sold 1.25 million devices, equating to less than 10% market share [2]. From what I remember Palm Pilots were the go to choice for PDAs, they were simple and worked. Other devices had come and gone. It would have been odd if they chosen something else. I doubt anyone was thinking it would be used for 20 years, though I don’t think people would have thought it would go away at the time.
I was thinking it’s not actually an obvious choice for controlling hardware. It was either an interesting choice that was small and didn’t need a lot of components, compared to the obvious PLC. Or it seemed like an obvious choice to someone that didn’t know better.[1] Either way, someone probably made a good decision to keep the old system maintainable by emulating the palm pilot instead of replacing it.
Mind you, it’s not clear how much of the control is done by the palm pilot. For all I know, it’s not much more than a screen connected to a PLC. But my gut feeling is it’s actually doing at least some of the control to be worth emulating and keeping the original software.
[1]You see this a ton now, with people reinventing the wheel using arduino, raspberry pi and spark fun parts to automate something in the small business they are employed at. Because they know these things as hobbyists, but they and anyone around were never exposed to PLCs. Soon after they leave, a newer employee will rebuild from scratch, maybe using ESP32. Overall the lifetime cost is probably much higher. Meanwhile a PLC from 1990 is fairly easy to maintain, repair or replace (including porting the software).
That device specifically was cheap and readily available. If it failed you could have gone to any OfficeMax or Circuit City and picked up a replacement.
Did you you ever attempt programming anything under PalmOs back then? It was quite fragile because of the extremely low amount of memory on board, which forced the use of relocatable memory handles, a bit like classic mac OS.
PalmOS and it's extreme focus on low end hardware was a super weird choice at the time. The one reason for using PalmOS was extreme battery life, which obviously was not a factor here.
There existed plenty better alternatives at the time.
I think it's a bit unfair to say "for aesthetic reasons".
The article says it's because projectionists are familiar with the Palm Pilot UI (because to them it's just another tool), and rather than get them to re-learn a different UI, they used emulation to provide the same familiar UI on newer hardware.
We (technology/digital experts) take for granted our level of comfort in sussing out how a new UI works.
They definitely did. My brother was happy to get my ibm branded palm pilot (WorkPad) because it would interface with serial obd-ii dongles. And the ice rink where my kiddo plays hockey has a scoreboard that was sold with a palm pilot to control it (someone in the beer league built replacement software for a PC when palm pilots became hard to source)
thats exactly why. It was a simple serial connection that could connect directly with other simple embedded systems. My local Lowes home store had a palm pilot that controlled their security system, and it was still in use just pre-COVID for exactly the same reason.
iPAQ ran Windows Mobile (a derivative of windows CE). I believe custom drivers were not well supported.
As well, back around 2009 I looked into Windows CE for a hobby project I thought about commercializing, and the licensing costs were INSANE. IIRC, there was a revenue component too.
While I don’t recall all specifics, I believe using Windows Mobile in an industrial use case it violated the EULA and you’d need to use a proper Windows CE env.
Total total guess here, but I wonder if they were tied to Windows CE, still paying licensing costs, given how few “true” imax screens there are, if the base licensing costs they’d have locked into 20 years ago, would’ve made “true” imax screens unprofitable/ have retired them at the onset of the pandemic
Idunno, Microsoft jumped through hoops to get folks ported to Windows Mobile. The problem was that WinCE was just vastly... more. At some point it essentially just looked like Windows. App development was quite straightforward. Mobile, on the other hand, was powerful but complex. And Mobile also had a really high bar for certification.
We definitely used Mobile in industrial use cases but WinCE was much, much easier to certify and much cheaper to keep around on old SKUs and LTS contracts.
Breaking orbit and sailing off on a tangent: I miss the Palm Pilot's Graffiti text-input system — I'd much rather have that than any of the various keyboards and swiping systems on the iPhone / iPad.
The iPad now has handwriting recognition in arbitrary text fields. You can just pick up the Apple Pencil and start writing somewhere. It’ll fill in with text as you write.
Based on my memory of Graffiti input speed, it was faster than modern smartphones once I account for all the time I spend correcting typos on virtual keyboards.
You can find all kinds of interesting emulator implementations out there. I’ve personally seen a large manufacturing shop run some of their core business processes inside DOSBox.
I worked with a large factory running all their lines and processes off an emulated, embedded controller. It was running on a desktop PC using NT 3.51 interfacing directly with real-world I/O.
I developed some PalmPilot applications, though they never went anywhere. I used Pocket C, which was a simplistic but workable environment that was interpreted on the device. I was also using IBM ThinkPads for factory controls around the same time period.
The PalmPilot had nice tiny form factor, probably its primary asset. A second benefit is that it had no fan. It was pretty typical for fan / heat / dust problems to bring down long-term software installations, along with the lifespan of CRT displays. Something like an IBM PC clone, if un-maintained, was good for at most a few years.
The PalmPilot hardware port was conventional RS232, so it was easy to mate it with outboard hardware. On later PP's, when they went to USB, I was able to interface them through the IR data port.
I miss using my Palm Pilot III. I still keep an emulator with the rom and my last data backup around, once in a blue moon I need to pull something off of it still. The graffiti input system worked great, I could enter data way faster than with any smart phone. I used to take lots of notes on the spot with it for work and personal use, but now I'm reduced to taking photos of any text data I need to save for later. I've used Palm and Blackberry through the years, and somehow the input devices that survived are the worst possible that could have survived. Everything that came before smart phone keyboards was better. The Palm Pilot was a more civilized tool for a more civilized time.
Readit News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apkOZrgueLQ
"PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME"
The iPhone future we have is disappointing compared to how I thought things would turn out.
https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net/
XCode is not free, just like macOS is not free; you just pay for them when you (over)pay for your mac hardware.
This functionality could probably be done with an iPhone or iPad and MFi today, if not a small form factor computer of some sort, or a Pi or Arduino.
I find a few things are missing for such an OS to be a daily driver, but there's definitely hope, and there's definitely a place where anyone interested can contribute.
This is exactly what Librem 5 is. It runs desktop an FSF-endorsed OS (Debian-based). My daily driver btw.
Yes, it's potentially less secure. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
The software is designed to mimic the look and feel of the old projectionist software (which ran on PP). It does not in any way emulate PalmOS or the PP hardware.
Citation? Here’s IMAX Engineering confirming that it’s emulating a Palm Pilot.
“The original Quick Turn Reel Units operated on Palm Pilots. In advance of the release of Oppenheimer, IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists,” an IMAX spokesperson told Motherboard.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88x5gb/imax-still-runs-on-pa...
It's not clear, but I assume it sends commands to the actual film hardware, and its not doing some real-time control.
"The software shows a handful of controls for the projectionist to queue up the film and control the platters that feed film at six feet per second. " [0]
[0] https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/imax-using-20-year-old-pa...
[1] https://history-computer.com/palm-pilot-guide/ [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pocket-pc-sales-1-million-and-...
Mind you, it’s not clear how much of the control is done by the palm pilot. For all I know, it’s not much more than a screen connected to a PLC. But my gut feeling is it’s actually doing at least some of the control to be worth emulating and keeping the original software.
[1]You see this a ton now, with people reinventing the wheel using arduino, raspberry pi and spark fun parts to automate something in the small business they are employed at. Because they know these things as hobbyists, but they and anyone around were never exposed to PLCs. Soon after they leave, a newer employee will rebuild from scratch, maybe using ESP32. Overall the lifetime cost is probably much higher. Meanwhile a PLC from 1990 is fairly easy to maintain, repair or replace (including porting the software).
https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~michalj/palmos/Memory.html
PalmOS and it's extreme focus on low end hardware was a super weird choice at the time. The one reason for using PalmOS was extreme battery life, which obviously was not a factor here.
There existed plenty better alternatives at the time.
The article says it's because projectionists are familiar with the Palm Pilot UI (because to them it's just another tool), and rather than get them to re-learn a different UI, they used emulation to provide the same familiar UI on newer hardware.
We (technology/digital experts) take for granted our level of comfort in sussing out how a new UI works.
Deleted Comment
iPAQ ran Windows Mobile (a derivative of windows CE). I believe custom drivers were not well supported.
As well, back around 2009 I looked into Windows CE for a hobby project I thought about commercializing, and the licensing costs were INSANE. IIRC, there was a revenue component too.
While I don’t recall all specifics, I believe using Windows Mobile in an industrial use case it violated the EULA and you’d need to use a proper Windows CE env.
Total total guess here, but I wonder if they were tied to Windows CE, still paying licensing costs, given how few “true” imax screens there are, if the base licensing costs they’d have locked into 20 years ago, would’ve made “true” imax screens unprofitable/ have retired them at the onset of the pandemic
We definitely used Mobile in industrial use cases but WinCE was much, much easier to certify and much cheaper to keep around on old SKUs and LTS contracts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWJZFQHklBg
No need for emulation when the original equipment is still working.
I worked with a large factory running all their lines and processes off an emulated, embedded controller. It was running on a desktop PC using NT 3.51 interfacing directly with real-world I/O.
The PalmPilot had nice tiny form factor, probably its primary asset. A second benefit is that it had no fan. It was pretty typical for fan / heat / dust problems to bring down long-term software installations, along with the lifespan of CRT displays. Something like an IBM PC clone, if un-maintained, was good for at most a few years.
The PalmPilot hardware port was conventional RS232, so it was easy to mate it with outboard hardware. On later PP's, when they went to USB, I was able to interface them through the IR data port.