4 ms·

Ha! I worked on this at a small company called STNC, who were acquired by Microsoft in July 1999. We provided the software. Random recollections. The codename

by pacaro 4y ago

Ha! I worked on this at a small company called STNC, who were acquired by Microsoft in July 1999. We provided the software. Random recollections. The codename at Atari was BSI which IIRC stood for Bob's Stupid Idea The screen was a disaster. There was a mismatch between the lcd and it's controller, so it could only be persuaded to provide three distinguishable shades. I had to bastardize our Floyd Steinberg ditherer into working with this. There was a production crunch deadline which lead to them being shipped from manufacturing (in China?) with a bad image. Every box then had to be opened and every device reflashed (no OTA updates back then) I'll see if anyone else has any good recollections...

billpg 4y ago
Hiya! I worked there in '97, first year at Bury St Edmunds.
- pacaro 4y ago
  In hindsight we worked on some very cool and very crazy things. The emailer (of course), the brother geobook (the first thing I worked on was an ill-fated color port), web libraries for the psion5 browser (a whole different tail of woe), a standards compliant (i.e. not wap, or proprietary transcoding) web browser on a cell phone demo in early 98 (that was mainly Dave and Chris?)
  - billpg 4y ago
    You had the perils of writing C for GEOS? Having to lock a block of memory before using it and then unlocking it when you've done. Looking back, my big regret was not trying harder to get C++ working. Having the compiler automatically insert unlock calls via a destructor function would have saved me a lot of time and screaming "Why are you still locked?" at the screen.
pacaro 4y ago
Apparently we did have OTA updates, but I definitely recall that the first batch all had to be reflashed, so the version on the hardware must have had a fairly critical bug. The article mentions that people would buy the emailer and not use the email capability. It was a decent phone in it's own right with built in voicemail (at the time a lot of people still had tape based voicemail "ansaphone™") which displayed missed calls and voicemails on the screen We may have been the first product to show an integrated inbox between phone and email, although again my memory is fuzzy

by pacaro 4y ago

billpg 4y ago

Hiya! I worked there in '97, first year at Bury St Edmunds.

pacaro 4y ago
In hindsight we worked on some very cool and very crazy things. The emailer (of course), the brother geobook (the first thing I worked on was an ill-fated color port), web libraries for the psion5 browser (a whole different tail of woe), a standards compliant (i.e. not wap, or proprietary transcoding) web browser on a cell phone demo in early 98 (that was mainly Dave and Chris?)
- billpg 4y ago
  You had the perils of writing C for GEOS? Having to lock a block of memory before using it and then unlocking it when you've done. Looking back, my big regret was not trying harder to get C++ working. Having the compiler automatically insert unlock calls via a destructor function would have saved me a lot of time and screaming "Why are you still locked?" at the screen.

pacaro 4y ago

Apparently we did have OTA updates, but I definitely recall that the first batch all had to be reflashed, so the version on the hardware must have had a fairly critical bug. The article mentions that people would buy the emailer and not use the email capability. It was a decent phone in it's own right with built in voicemail (at the time a lot of people still had tape based voicemail "ansaphone™") which displayed missed calls and voicemails on the screen We may have been the first product to show an integrated inbox between phone and email, although again my memory is fuzzy