2 ms·
Wow, brought back a lot of memories. I worked for Motorola on the Envoy team. It was my first encounter with Reality Distortion Field engineering. I remember th
by blacksqr 11y ago
Wow, brought back a lot of memories. I worked for Motorola on the Envoy team. It was my first encounter with Reality Distortion Field engineering. I remember their software engineers were literally called "wizards" as their job title. They developed a custom fully object-oriented programming language to write the OS in, and confidently assured us that it was so advanced that the OS would ultimately be delivered with literally zero bugs. This in the face of build after build of buggy, unstable, backward-incompatible code. I remember the change of line terminator from semicolon to colon (or vice versa?) when the product was already months past its original ship date. Good times.
- mwcampbell 11y agoCan you tell us more about the programming language and operating system? For example, how did memory management work? Was it based on garbage collection, reference counting, or still manual memory management? And what about persistent storage? I gather from the OP that fragmentation of persistent storage was a big problem.
- blacksqr 11y agoWe weren't allowed access to the OS code itself, just the developer API, so I can't give detailed info about the implementation. I was the chief QA engineer for the Envoy team, but I was locked out of bug discussion meetings with the GM people. Everything was handled at a very high level. I remember they were very proud of the fact that the programming language was fully object oriented, and drank deep of the OO kool-aid. So no C-style direct memory access AFAIR.