18 ms·

Symbian OS Kernel (2010)

141 points by initramfs 4y ago

notRobot 4y ago
Over the past decade I've purchased several Chinese cheapo keypad phones, and they all seem to run a very similar java-based OS. Does anyone have any information on what OS that is exactly, and if it's open source?
- jpegqs 4y ago
  I recently ordered and researched the cheapest feature phones (and some smartwatches), looks like half of that market is occupied by Unisoc with the SC6531(E/DA) chipset (from the Spreadtrum company they bought). It uses Mocor OS. The second half of this market is occupied by Mediatek MT6260/MT6261 chipsets. I wrote tools to run my code on these chipsets. There are also phones on Mocor5 OS, a little more expensive, it's actually Android 4.4 on the Spreadtrum SC7715 chipset. I didn't find any Java here, but these CPUs have a Jazelle ARM extension to run Java bytecode. P.S.: There's an old project based on reverse engineered MT6260 firmware: https://github.com/xobs/fernly https://github.com/xobs/fernly
  - jpegqs 4y ago
    I wanted to run Doom on one of them. So far I have LCD control for SC6531E (with 9306 LCD panel), USB control for SC6531E/SC6531DA and USB control for MT6260/MT6261 (using API from bootloader). I load the code not while the OS is running, but through boot via USB. SC6531DA is similar to SC6531E, but some constants have been changed, so additional research into its firmware is required. I have enough knowledge to run some game on the SC6531E, but a lot of work still needs to be done. Anyone want to cooperate with me?
    - initramfs 4y ago
      I've been curious as to the Unisoc T117 RTOS in the Nokia 225 4G- it is Mocor RTOS, but I have no info on what its origins are. Could it be an EKA2-based Symbian? The UI looks somewhat similar https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_us/nokia-225-4g https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_us/nokia-225-4g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UNISOC_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UNISOC_processors -uses only 1 cpu https://web.archive.org/web/20220704160232/https://www.unisoc.com/en_us/home/TGNSJ-T117 https://web.archive.org/web/20220704160232/https://www.uniso...
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  Symbian is not Java-based.
- xobs 4y ago
  It's probably Nucleus, which is what Mediatek uses a lot on their low-end phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_RTOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_RTOS It's not open source per se, but the phones themselves tend to have very little modification from the reference EVK, which means if you can find the BSP you can usually build a firmware image that will work on a device.
  - jpegqs 4y ago
    I don't know if the Mediatek chips have overridable pins, but the Spreadtrum does. There are also different LCD panels that have slightly different interfaces for which you will need to write a driver (and find it from the original firmware). The button mapping also may vary. So writing firmware that will work on most phones on a particular chipset will not be so easy.
  - jpegqs 4y ago
    From the ones I got, I found MAUI in the name of the firmware, and on Wikipedia I found these notes: > MAUI, a feature-phone operating system used with MediaTek-based shanzhai devices, also used on Motorola phones and some Samsung feature phones. > MediaTek developed an embedded operating system named MAUI Runtime Environment which is based on Nucleus RTOS. So it's not raw Nucleus.
  - HeckFeck 4y ago
    Nucleus? How's its Weissman score?
initramfs 4y ago
"Symbian Source Code Final repositories from the defunct Symbian Foundation"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jokowueu 4y ago
In my opinion it's the best phone first os . Tried it a few years ago and it was perfect Happy it's been opensourced interesting forks out there as well www.github.com/squaklabs/miraicat-kernel
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Hard disagree. I really loved candybar phones. I just wished that Nokia/Microsoft had picked up android for their feature phones. IMO, the best OS is the one that has access to banking applications and lots of vendor support.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I worked at Nokia when management stubbornly kept flogging the dead horse that was Symbian. It didn't work. It just wasn't good enough. Android, even in it's early versions was hardly perfect but still ran circles around Symbian. Android at the time had issues with stability, features, performance, etc. But it was a breath of fresh air compared to Symbian devices which had even more of those type of issues. And of course the iphone redefined what a smart phone should be around the same time. Nokia actually opensourced it around that time as well. Symbian has been open source for well over a decade. This looks more like the retirement of what remains of that effort, which included the Symbian Foundation. Presumably, by now there are very few; if any, commercial users of Symbian left. So, they are parking the source code at Github for whomever still has some use for it. As you can see from the commit logs, development has been dead since 2010. I seriously doubt that is going to change.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    I don't know, Nokia C7 was pretty good in 2011, Android was nowhere near it. Granted, I never tried developing for it.
    - forty 4y ago
      Yeah, I had a Nokia E65 (2007) and with Opera mini I was able to browse the real web normally. That's why I never quite understood what was all the "revolution" around iphone (except the touch part, but that seemed to me to be a really bad idea at the time, as someone could not stand fingers on screens ^^)
sturza 4y ago
What did they use Obj-C for?
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  You can click through to view matching files: https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.os.kernelhwsrv/search?l=objective-c https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.os.kernelhwsrv/s... In this case, it seems the answer is nothing. It’s just a bug in the GitHub language detection code.
anta40 4y ago
So, how can we build this thing? No documentation/README etc
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  You've ever been to a junkyard? If you pick up a broken amplifier, it's not going to have a user manual taped to it. You're going to have to figure things out. This is essentially code junkyard. 13 years old and rusting.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  You will need to find a development kit somewhere. The documentation on this random website seems accurate https://docs.huihoo.com/symbian/nokia-symbian3-developers-library-v0.8/GUID-3100800B-B2F7-50EF-BD4C-3C345ECCB2A5.html https://docs.huihoo.com/symbian/nokia-symbian3-developers-li...
  - initramfs 4y ago
    OP Here. Found that there's a previous thread, with more info SDK tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492447
- edderly 4y ago
  I'd try to build a textshell image, maybe the emulator or the beagleboard https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.beagleboard/tree/master/omap3530 https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.beagleboar...
  - edderly 4y ago
    Oh look qemu too https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu/blob/master/docs/svp-docs.pdf https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu/blob/...
kgeist 4y ago
I wonder what was the rationale for their formatting rules. No spaces around "=", "==" or "," but there're spaces around "?" and "||".
- swinglock 4y ago
  Are there rules? Nothing is consistent even within single function.
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    There were definitely rules, but as the company grew it seems they were not followed all that strictly.
dm319 4y ago
When I got my Nokia E90 in 2007ish, it's hard to describe the power and potential in that device. It was multitasking, 3G, GPS, camera, video, email, web, app store etc. The big downfall of these devices was that consumers weren't familiar with the types of mobile contracts, and specifically data. The iphone got it right by only selling the iphone with a data package, whereas people bought these symbian smartphone and later found they couldn't make full use of them. Not to mention back then we had to set up the internet connection ourselves. I moved onto the N900 when my E90 slipped out my linen trousers in a taxi in Morocco.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  N900 was a mighty beast, I only moved off it when its power port tore away. Too bad Nokia did not have the focus to stick to one platform (Maemo vs. MeeGo vs. Windows Phone)
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    It took me about a decade to move from N900, and even then it's still handling one of my SIMs.
    - ploum 4y ago
      The N900 was running a modified Debian Linux version call Maemo. Not related to Symbian at all.
      - seba_dos1 4y ago
        Your GP already noted that in a way.
- nikanj 4y ago
  The software quality was also absolute dogshit. Your phone would ring, you would click on the button to answer, and the phone app would just crash. It was nice having irc and a good ssh client on my phone, but the phone was simply not stable enough for a daily driver.
DrNosferatu 4y ago
Have you ever tried to code any non-trivial application for Symbian / S60? If you ever did, the business opportunity to build a mobile platform with any sort of half-sane API will immediately scream very loudly at your face - and that's exactly what Apple did with iOS. The rest is History. A real sad story - the hardware was quite capable for the time.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  The thing is Nokia was not a software first company. It was a phone/electronics company so that's where the decision making was biased. Someone here posted that the Symbian repos were in such a mess that compiling the OS would take over 2 days and nobody in management saw a problem with that. It's easy now in hindsight to say they could have won the market with a software ecosystem but back then that was not clear for them. It was clear for Apple since they had the experience monetizing the iTunes ecosystem and they were a software focused company.
  - DrNosferatu 4y ago
    It was very clear then for me! I had to professionally code an image processing application for Symbian in 2008/9, and that's when I formed this opinion. Apple & Android seemed to agree :) What's surprising is that there weren't more attempts at a sane mobile platform/API - and earlier.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      2008/2009 was pretty late in the game for such a large ship like Nokia to change course. Their financial situation back then was still good enough to no bother with a massive change of course. Sure, you saw it, but Nokia management was out of touch and more preoccupied with the next quarter rather than with the next 3 years, as it the case in many large old companies.
      - fifilura 4y ago
        The sad part was that they had the platform that could have competed with ios and android. A linux based platform that they had worked on since 2005. (Or 2004 even). For som reason the not-so-visionary mgmt decided to cut it, right when it should have started to scale up.
edderly 4y ago
Does anyone know what license this is under?
- npteljes 4y ago
  They don't state explicitly, so it's basically source-available software, not Open Source (nor Free Software). https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/06/nokia_confirms_symbian_not_open/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/06/nokia_confirms_symbia...
jbj 4y ago
saved up in high school to buy P1i (sony ericsson) and remember the feeling of being blown away when installing the first third party app, I think a weather app.
pmarreck 4y ago
Brings back memories of hacked N-Gage titles running on my Not-N-Gage-But-Same-Hardware-And-OS Nokia lol Seriously though I cannot understate what a step it was to go from that to the first iPhone
- pmarreck 4y ago
  crap, I meant "overstate"
zokier 4y ago
What is surprising is that Symbian did not manage to pivot to embedded market in any way, to compete with VxWorks and its likes. It was a fairly advanced RTOS at it's heart afterall, and proven to work well on ARM platforms.
- miohtama 4y ago
  Symbian started as an embedded platform “OS for toasters.” It was independent, used by mobile phone manufacturers like Sony, Ericsson, others. It was also used in non-mobile phone applications. Nokia bought the whole Symbian in-house in attempt to compete against Android and iOS. Others non-Apple brands had already switched to Android in this point. Steven Elop joined Nokia had a had management bonus incentives to sell the Nokia Mobile Phones (not Networks) to Microsoft. Which he did. It was good for Nokia shareholders. Few years later Microsoft had screwed up things even worse and wrote Nokia purchase value from $7B to zero. In this point, Symbian was buried long ago. Microsoft had never incentive to spin it out or make it a success story. Their only goal was Windows dominance.
  - zokier 4y ago
    > Symbian started as an embedded platform “OS for toasters.” Nope. Symbian started as an initiative to get Psions palmtop OS to cellphones; larger embedded market was never a consideration.
borissk 4y ago
I see why it was so slow - there are DELAYs sprinkled everywhere.
dancemethis 4y ago
The best thing about Symbian is that "it was never actually Symbian, it's S60 or whatever".
HeckFeck 4y ago
Interesting source dump. I see a lot of utility scripts written in Perl; they even have the documentation as well-formatted POD. I wonder if there are any references to its progenitor the PSION. A cursory glance revealed none, at least not in the copyright headers.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  The e32 prefix used in the source is for EPOC32, Symbian’s original name, so you can count that as a reference. But books about Symbian say it was a complete rewrite of the original 16-bit, C-language EPOC, there probably isn’t any code that comes from there verbatim. (The Psion was the brand of computers, the EPOC was the OS.)
  - HeckFeck 4y ago
    Ah, I knew they were related but I wasn't sure of the precise nature of the relationship. Thanks for gratifying my curiosity.
thunkshift1 4y ago
How to begin to start understanding a codebase like this? Where does one start
- _448 4y ago
  Depends on your interest. It is an operating system, so has lot of different parts. It is a microkernel with other parts as servers e.g for graphics there is window server, for filesystem there is file server etc. Start from the server for the area you are interested in and then move down to the related drivers and finally the kernel. You will need to understand some of the design patterns used in Symbian though, which are bit unique.
fork-bomber 4y ago
In an attempt to learn more, I accidentally misspelt Symbian as Sybian on Google search. The world truly is er wondrous. Cough.
chronomex 4y ago
another copy, in the original Mercurial, and with mediawiki dumps too: https://archive.org/details/SymbianOpenSource https://archive.org/details/SymbianOpenSource

141 points by initramfs 4y ago

Over the past decade I've purchased several Chinese cheapo keypad phones, and they all seem to run a very similar java-based OS. Does anyone have any information on what OS that is exactly, and if it's open source?

jpegqs 4y ago
I recently ordered and researched the cheapest feature phones (and some smartwatches), looks like half of that market is occupied by Unisoc with the SC6531(E/DA) chipset (from the Spreadtrum company they bought). It uses Mocor OS. The second half of this market is occupied by Mediatek MT6260/MT6261 chipsets. I wrote tools to run my code on these chipsets. There are also phones on Mocor5 OS, a little more expensive, it's actually Android 4.4 on the Spreadtrum SC7715 chipset. I didn't find any Java here, but these CPUs have a Jazelle ARM extension to run Java bytecode. P.S.: There's an old project based on reverse engineered MT6260 firmware: https://github.com/xobs/fernly https://github.com/xobs/fernly
- jpegqs 4y ago
  I wanted to run Doom on one of them. So far I have LCD control for SC6531E (with 9306 LCD panel), USB control for SC6531E/SC6531DA and USB control for MT6260/MT6261 (using API from bootloader). I load the code not while the OS is running, but through boot via USB. SC6531DA is similar to SC6531E, but some constants have been changed, so additional research into its firmware is required. I have enough knowledge to run some game on the SC6531E, but a lot of work still needs to be done. Anyone want to cooperate with me?
  - initramfs 4y ago
    I've been curious as to the Unisoc T117 RTOS in the Nokia 225 4G- it is Mocor RTOS, but I have no info on what its origins are. Could it be an EKA2-based Symbian? The UI looks somewhat similar https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_us/nokia-225-4g https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_us/nokia-225-4g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UNISOC_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UNISOC_processors -uses only 1 cpu https://web.archive.org/web/20220704160232/https://www.unisoc.com/en_us/home/TGNSJ-T117 https://web.archive.org/web/20220704160232/https://www.uniso...
seba_dos1 4y ago
Symbian is not Java-based.
xobs 4y ago
It's probably Nucleus, which is what Mediatek uses a lot on their low-end phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_RTOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleus_RTOS It's not open source per se, but the phones themselves tend to have very little modification from the reference EVK, which means if you can find the BSP you can usually build a firmware image that will work on a device.
- jpegqs 4y ago
  I don't know if the Mediatek chips have overridable pins, but the Spreadtrum does. There are also different LCD panels that have slightly different interfaces for which you will need to write a driver (and find it from the original firmware). The button mapping also may vary. So writing firmware that will work on most phones on a particular chipset will not be so easy.
- jpegqs 4y ago
  From the ones I got, I found MAUI in the name of the firmware, and on Wikipedia I found these notes: > MAUI, a feature-phone operating system used with MediaTek-based shanzhai devices, also used on Motorola phones and some Samsung feature phones. > MediaTek developed an embedded operating system named MAUI Runtime Environment which is based on Nucleus RTOS. So it's not raw Nucleus.
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  Nucleus? How's its Weissman score?

initramfs 4y ago

"Symbian Source Code Final repositories from the defunct Symbian Foundation"

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jokowueu 4y ago

In my opinion it's the best phone first os . Tried it a few years ago and it was perfect Happy it's been opensourced interesting forks out there as well www.github.com/squaklabs/miraicat-kernel

gonzo41 4y ago
Hard disagree. I really loved candybar phones. I just wished that Nokia/Microsoft had picked up android for their feature phones. IMO, the best OS is the one that has access to banking applications and lots of vendor support.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I worked at Nokia when management stubbornly kept flogging the dead horse that was Symbian. It didn't work. It just wasn't good enough. Android, even in it's early versions was hardly perfect but still ran circles around Symbian. Android at the time had issues with stability, features, performance, etc. But it was a breath of fresh air compared to Symbian devices which had even more of those type of issues. And of course the iphone redefined what a smart phone should be around the same time. Nokia actually opensourced it around that time as well. Symbian has been open source for well over a decade. This looks more like the retirement of what remains of that effort, which included the Symbian Foundation. Presumably, by now there are very few; if any, commercial users of Symbian left. So, they are parking the source code at Github for whomever still has some use for it. As you can see from the commit logs, development has been dead since 2010. I seriously doubt that is going to change.
- jojobas 4y ago
  I don't know, Nokia C7 was pretty good in 2011, Android was nowhere near it. Granted, I never tried developing for it.
  - forty 4y ago
    Yeah, I had a Nokia E65 (2007) and with Opera mini I was able to browse the real web normally. That's why I never quite understood what was all the "revolution" around iphone (except the touch part, but that seemed to me to be a really bad idea at the time, as someone could not stand fingers on screens ^^)

sturza 4y ago

What did they use Obj-C for?

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
You can click through to view matching files: https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.os.kernelhwsrv/search?l=objective-c https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.os.kernelhwsrv/s... In this case, it seems the answer is nothing. It’s just a bug in the GitHub language detection code.

anta40 4y ago

So, how can we build this thing? No documentation/README etc

systemvoltage 4y ago
You've ever been to a junkyard? If you pick up a broken amplifier, it's not going to have a user manual taped to it. You're going to have to figure things out. This is essentially code junkyard. 13 years old and rusting.
secondcoming 4y ago
You will need to find a development kit somewhere. The documentation on this random website seems accurate https://docs.huihoo.com/symbian/nokia-symbian3-developers-library-v0.8/GUID-3100800B-B2F7-50EF-BD4C-3C345ECCB2A5.html https://docs.huihoo.com/symbian/nokia-symbian3-developers-li...
- initramfs 4y ago
  OP Here. Found that there's a previous thread, with more info SDK tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492447
edderly 4y ago
I'd try to build a textshell image, maybe the emulator or the beagleboard https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.beagleboard/tree/master/omap3530 https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.beagleboar...
- edderly 4y ago
  Oh look qemu too https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu/blob/master/docs/svp-docs.pdf https://github.com/SymbianSource/oss.FCL.sf.adapt.Qemu/blob/...

kgeist 4y ago

I wonder what was the rationale for their formatting rules. No spaces around "=", "==" or "," but there're spaces around "?" and "||".

swinglock 4y ago
Are there rules? Nothing is consistent even within single function.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  There were definitely rules, but as the company grew it seems they were not followed all that strictly.

dm319 4y ago

When I got my Nokia E90 in 2007ish, it's hard to describe the power and potential in that device. It was multitasking, 3G, GPS, camera, video, email, web, app store etc. The big downfall of these devices was that consumers weren't familiar with the types of mobile contracts, and specifically data. The iphone got it right by only selling the iphone with a data package, whereas people bought these symbian smartphone and later found they couldn't make full use of them. Not to mention back then we had to set up the internet connection ourselves. I moved onto the N900 when my E90 slipped out my linen trousers in a taxi in Morocco.

thriftwy 4y ago
N900 was a mighty beast, I only moved off it when its power port tore away. Too bad Nokia did not have the focus to stick to one platform (Maemo vs. MeeGo vs. Windows Phone)
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  It took me about a decade to move from N900, and even then it's still handling one of my SIMs.
  - ploum 4y ago
    The N900 was running a modified Debian Linux version call Maemo. Not related to Symbian at all.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      Your GP already noted that in a way.
nikanj 4y ago
The software quality was also absolute dogshit. Your phone would ring, you would click on the button to answer, and the phone app would just crash. It was nice having irc and a good ssh client on my phone, but the phone was simply not stable enough for a daily driver.

DrNosferatu 4y ago

Have you ever tried to code any non-trivial application for Symbian / S60? If you ever did, the business opportunity to build a mobile platform with any sort of half-sane API will immediately scream very loudly at your face - and that's exactly what Apple did with iOS. The rest is History. A real sad story - the hardware was quite capable for the time.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
The thing is Nokia was not a software first company. It was a phone/electronics company so that's where the decision making was biased. Someone here posted that the Symbian repos were in such a mess that compiling the OS would take over 2 days and nobody in management saw a problem with that. It's easy now in hindsight to say they could have won the market with a software ecosystem but back then that was not clear for them. It was clear for Apple since they had the experience monetizing the iTunes ecosystem and they were a software focused company.
- DrNosferatu 4y ago
  It was very clear then for me! I had to professionally code an image processing application for Symbian in 2008/9, and that's when I formed this opinion. Apple & Android seemed to agree :) What's surprising is that there weren't more attempts at a sane mobile platform/API - and earlier.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    2008/2009 was pretty late in the game for such a large ship like Nokia to change course. Their financial situation back then was still good enough to no bother with a massive change of course. Sure, you saw it, but Nokia management was out of touch and more preoccupied with the next quarter rather than with the next 3 years, as it the case in many large old companies.
    - fifilura 4y ago
      The sad part was that they had the platform that could have competed with ios and android. A linux based platform that they had worked on since 2005. (Or 2004 even). For som reason the not-so-visionary mgmt decided to cut it, right when it should have started to scale up.

edderly 4y ago

Does anyone know what license this is under?

npteljes 4y ago
They don't state explicitly, so it's basically source-available software, not Open Source (nor Free Software). https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/06/nokia_confirms_symbian_not_open/ https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/06/nokia_confirms_symbia...

jbj 4y ago

saved up in high school to buy P1i (sony ericsson) and remember the feeling of being blown away when installing the first third party app, I think a weather app.

pmarreck 4y ago

Brings back memories of hacked N-Gage titles running on my Not-N-Gage-But-Same-Hardware-And-OS Nokia lol Seriously though I cannot understate what a step it was to go from that to the first iPhone

pmarreck 4y ago
crap, I meant "overstate"

zokier 4y ago

What is surprising is that Symbian did not manage to pivot to embedded market in any way, to compete with VxWorks and its likes. It was a fairly advanced RTOS at it's heart afterall, and proven to work well on ARM platforms.

miohtama 4y ago
Symbian started as an embedded platform “OS for toasters.” It was independent, used by mobile phone manufacturers like Sony, Ericsson, others. It was also used in non-mobile phone applications. Nokia bought the whole Symbian in-house in attempt to compete against Android and iOS. Others non-Apple brands had already switched to Android in this point. Steven Elop joined Nokia had a had management bonus incentives to sell the Nokia Mobile Phones (not Networks) to Microsoft. Which he did. It was good for Nokia shareholders. Few years later Microsoft had screwed up things even worse and wrote Nokia purchase value from $7B to zero. In this point, Symbian was buried long ago. Microsoft had never incentive to spin it out or make it a success story. Their only goal was Windows dominance.
- zokier 4y ago
  > Symbian started as an embedded platform “OS for toasters.” Nope. Symbian started as an initiative to get Psions palmtop OS to cellphones; larger embedded market was never a consideration.

borissk 4y ago

I see why it was so slow - there are DELAYs sprinkled everywhere.

dancemethis 4y ago

The best thing about Symbian is that "it was never actually Symbian, it's S60 or whatever".

HeckFeck 4y ago

Interesting source dump. I see a lot of utility scripts written in Perl; they even have the documentation as well-formatted POD. I wonder if there are any references to its progenitor the PSION. A cursory glance revealed none, at least not in the copyright headers.

mananaysiempre 4y ago
The e32 prefix used in the source is for EPOC32, Symbian’s original name, so you can count that as a reference. But books about Symbian say it was a complete rewrite of the original 16-bit, C-language EPOC, there probably isn’t any code that comes from there verbatim. (The Psion was the brand of computers, the EPOC was the OS.)
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  Ah, I knew they were related but I wasn't sure of the precise nature of the relationship. Thanks for gratifying my curiosity.

thunkshift1 4y ago

How to begin to start understanding a codebase like this? Where does one start

_448 4y ago
Depends on your interest. It is an operating system, so has lot of different parts. It is a microkernel with other parts as servers e.g for graphics there is window server, for filesystem there is file server etc. Start from the server for the area you are interested in and then move down to the related drivers and finally the kernel. You will need to understand some of the design patterns used in Symbian though, which are bit unique.

fork-bomber 4y ago

In an attempt to learn more, I accidentally misspelt Symbian as Sybian on Google search. The world truly is er wondrous. Cough.

chronomex 4y ago

another copy, in the original Mercurial, and with mediawiki dumps too: https://archive.org/details/SymbianOpenSource https://archive.org/details/SymbianOpenSource