7 ms·

Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open thou

Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.

t_mann 4y ago
I vaguely recall Symbian being adopted/developed(?) by Nokia. It's incredible how early Symbian was, but what's most remarkable is that it wasn't even Nokia's only shot at a smartphone OS, they also had Maemo.
- FridayoLeary 4y ago
  It's a shame Nokia is now throwing away everything they know about Symbian. The new nokia OS is shockingly crap. Some functions straight out don't work and other functions such as T9 text are awful. It's a shame when you realise that their old Symbian phones work perfectly well and there was no need to change it.
  - dancek 4y ago
    The even older DCT3 generation of Nokia phones worked much better than Symbian ever did. Nokia 6210 is still a great phone if you only need to call and receive SMS. But anything with a color display from that era is really showing its age by now.
  - distances 4y ago
    Nokia hasn't been making phones for a long time. They license the name for HMD Global and the modern devices have nothing to do with Nokia itself.
fps_doug 4y ago
Especially if it's something you used and liked. But yes, I'm a big fan of releasing these things to the public, for archival and for the curious. It's crazy how even big companies lose source code of old software, or at least only have it accessible in a completely chaotic state, with a missing build system, missing instructions, etc. Recent example would be 3D Movie Maker by Microsoft. People got it to compile eventually, but it apparently was a wild undertaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXTzlDZmhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXTzlDZmhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtKHPwTWsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtKHPwTWsc
danuker 4y ago
Indeed. Every time someone builds a walled garden, effort is duplicated needlessly, both in building it, and in using it.
perryizgr8 4y ago
Nokia earned billions from this code. I bet those hours were paid back many times over.
- usr1106 4y ago
  No, they probably didn't earn billions from that code. Their biggest cash cows were feature phones (non-Symbian) that sold 10-50 times as many as Symbian phones and were developed with many times smaller budgets. While some Symbian phones were pretty good for their area, there were probably at least as many failed projects as successful ones.
  - perryizgr8 4y ago
    I don't have any data to back this up, but I think they sold hundreds of millions of high end (and expensive for the time) smartphones running Symbian. Remember the N line? The E line? Communicators? All running Symbian, all bestsellers for years.
    - usr1106 4y ago
      No, I remember attending parties when 1 or 2 millions of a model had been sold. At the same time Nokia sold over 100 million of feature phones a year. Edit: As you write they were expensive. So while Nokia was the undisputd leader in the segment for a couple of years the absolute numbers were not that big. I remember some year the worldwide phone market was 400 million a year. Nokia had over 100 million of them, but smart phones (Symbian) only single digit millions.
      - perryizgr8 4y ago
        One model, N95, sold 10 million units. It was priced at around $500. That's 5 billion revenue from one model alone. I'm sure feature phones sold a lot more, but that's irrelevant.
        usr1106 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pavlov 4y ago
Symbian, the Ozymandias of smartphone operating systems. They had a lot of the right ideas very early. They started building a high-resolution graphical mobile OS for 32-bit ARM in the mid-1990s, when most phones barely could display two lines of text and receive an SMS. Many concepts in iOS and Android today were pioneered by Symbian. IMO, the biggest failing of Symbian was to disown the UI and focus on the lower layers of the operating system. Symbian's licensees like Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson wanted to control the GUI layer themselves, so they had annoyingly incompatible GUI libraries for Symbian. The platform was already hard to develop for, and then you had multiple vendors piling gunk on top like Nokia's Series 60 which was a terrible piece of work. In a parellel universe Symbian would have acquired the BeOS team in 2003 and kept them in Silicon Valley, tasked with building a truly excellent mobile GUI on a five-year time horizon independent of Nokia's meddling. A well-designed high-level UI framework in a reasonable language could have made the embedded C++ underpinnings of Symbian mostly irrelevant — basically shipping Android a couple of years before the fact.
- klaussilveira 4y ago
  TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias
  - ff317 4y ago
    Also one of several instances where the Breaking Bad writers put a lot of thought into amazing episode themes and titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)
- msh 4y ago
  I think as long as it was companies like nokia who liked to create smartphones that where primarily phones with texting first and computers a very distant second Symbian did not have a chance. I know that they made stuff like the 9x00 communicators but they where never intended as mass market products. Nokia was never able to craft a desirable product that brought applications to the mainstream user, most people who got their smartphones only used them as phones.
nomoreusernames 4y ago
im still using workbench.
spyremeown 4y ago
Not really... it had its use. Code vanishes so quickly.
cortesoft 4y ago
It is the destiny for most code written.
- whartung 4y ago
  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 contributions are long gone. We don't build bridges in this business, thats for sure.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    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.
atleta 4y ago
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, if I'm not mistaken, at least a thousand people were working on Symbian and Symbian based products. So switching away from it was simply out of question. It would have been too bold a move. (Especially, since Nokia was dominating the market and these products brought in a very nice profit.)
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  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-burning-platform/ https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops...
  - atleta 4y ago
    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.

Anyone else feel sad coming across something like this? So many hours spent for a product that is largely forgotten. Glad to see the pieces out in the open though.

t_mann 4y ago

I vaguely recall Symbian being adopted/developed(?) by Nokia. It's incredible how early Symbian was, but what's most remarkable is that it wasn't even Nokia's only shot at a smartphone OS, they also had Maemo.

FridayoLeary 4y ago
It's a shame Nokia is now throwing away everything they know about Symbian. The new nokia OS is shockingly crap. Some functions straight out don't work and other functions such as T9 text are awful. It's a shame when you realise that their old Symbian phones work perfectly well and there was no need to change it.
- dancek 4y ago
  The even older DCT3 generation of Nokia phones worked much better than Symbian ever did. Nokia 6210 is still a great phone if you only need to call and receive SMS. But anything with a color display from that era is really showing its age by now.
- distances 4y ago
  Nokia hasn't been making phones for a long time. They license the name for HMD Global and the modern devices have nothing to do with Nokia itself.

fps_doug 4y ago

Especially if it's something you used and liked. But yes, I'm a big fan of releasing these things to the public, for archival and for the curious. It's crazy how even big companies lose source code of old software, or at least only have it accessible in a completely chaotic state, with a missing build system, missing instructions, etc. Recent example would be 3D Movie Maker by Microsoft. People got it to compile eventually, but it apparently was a wild undertaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXTzlDZmhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXTzlDZmhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtKHPwTWsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjtKHPwTWsc

danuker 4y ago

Indeed. Every time someone builds a walled garden, effort is duplicated needlessly, both in building it, and in using it.

perryizgr8 4y ago

Nokia earned billions from this code. I bet those hours were paid back many times over.

usr1106 4y ago
No, they probably didn't earn billions from that code. Their biggest cash cows were feature phones (non-Symbian) that sold 10-50 times as many as Symbian phones and were developed with many times smaller budgets. While some Symbian phones were pretty good for their area, there were probably at least as many failed projects as successful ones.
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  I don't have any data to back this up, but I think they sold hundreds of millions of high end (and expensive for the time) smartphones running Symbian. Remember the N line? The E line? Communicators? All running Symbian, all bestsellers for years.
  - usr1106 4y ago
    No, I remember attending parties when 1 or 2 millions of a model had been sold. At the same time Nokia sold over 100 million of feature phones a year. Edit: As you write they were expensive. So while Nokia was the undisputd leader in the segment for a couple of years the absolute numbers were not that big. I remember some year the worldwide phone market was 400 million a year. Nokia had over 100 million of them, but smart phones (Symbian) only single digit millions.
    - perryizgr8 4y ago
      One model, N95, sold 10 million units. It was priced at around $500. That's 5 billion revenue from one model alone. I'm sure feature phones sold a lot more, but that's irrelevant.
      - usr1106 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pavlov 4y ago

Symbian, the Ozymandias of smartphone operating systems. They had a lot of the right ideas very early. They started building a high-resolution graphical mobile OS for 32-bit ARM in the mid-1990s, when most phones barely could display two lines of text and receive an SMS. Many concepts in iOS and Android today were pioneered by Symbian. IMO, the biggest failing of Symbian was to disown the UI and focus on the lower layers of the operating system. Symbian's licensees like Nokia, Motorola and SonyEricsson wanted to control the GUI layer themselves, so they had annoyingly incompatible GUI libraries for Symbian. The platform was already hard to develop for, and then you had multiple vendors piling gunk on top like Nokia's Series 60 which was a terrible piece of work. In a parellel universe Symbian would have acquired the BeOS team in 2003 and kept them in Silicon Valley, tasked with building a truly excellent mobile GUI on a five-year time horizon independent of Nokia's meddling. A well-designed high-level UI framework in a reasonable language could have made the embedded C++ underpinnings of Symbian mostly irrelevant — basically shipping Android a couple of years before the fact.

klaussilveira 4y ago
TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias
- ff317 4y ago
  Also one of several instances where the Breaking Bad writers put a lot of thought into amazing episode themes and titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)
msh 4y ago
I think as long as it was companies like nokia who liked to create smartphones that where primarily phones with texting first and computers a very distant second Symbian did not have a chance. I know that they made stuff like the 9x00 communicators but they where never intended as mass market products. Nokia was never able to craft a desirable product that brought applications to the mainstream user, most people who got their smartphones only used them as phones.

nomoreusernames 4y ago

im still using workbench.

spyremeown 4y ago

Not really... it had its use. Code vanishes so quickly.

cortesoft 4y ago

It is the destiny for most code written.

whartung 4y ago
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 contributions are long gone. We don't build bridges in this business, thats for sure.
- mulmen 4y ago
  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.

atleta 4y ago

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, if I'm not mistaken, at least a thousand people were working on Symbian and Symbian based products. So switching away from it was simply out of question. It would have been too bold a move. (Especially, since Nokia was dominating the market and these products brought in a very nice profit.)

kjellsbells 4y ago
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-burning-platform/ https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops...
- atleta 4y ago
  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.