Hacker News Reader

Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up against the same ceiling.

Didn't know about this. This is before ‘webOS’, right? What kind of OS problems are we talking here?

View on HN

A long time ago now, but I vaguely recall that the original PalmPilot OS chose to replicate the mistakes of the original Mac. Data structures exposed all over the place, apps had to implement the basics of event handling rather than have most of it handled for them.

I'm not sure what services PalmOS provided to the apps, but to my limited knowledge the apps themselves were non-multitasking, and had a standardized database per each app instead of the filesystem (i.e. something like proto-IndexedDB, but more oriented to documents or blobs). So it's kinda difficult to imagine them having the problems of quasi-multitasking and more complex MacOS. But perhaps things became involved by PalmOS 5.

Though the event handling part sounds like DOS' raw approach, versus Win95's abstraction—and I guess could plague any kind of a system.

Palm OS was designed for the hardware of the time. It was very simple but ran well. Compared to Microsoft's approach of building a stripped down clone of Windows NT that barely ran on the hardware of the era. But in the long term Microsoft's approach was more successful because as hardware improved they had an OS ready to take advantage of it.

Of course, what Microsoft wasn't ready for was the hardware getting so good that Apple could just port their existing desktop OS and software over.

> What Microsoft wasn't ready for was the hardware getting so good that Apple could just port their existing desktop OS and software over.

Eh, I mean, MS attempted that more that once themselves: though WinCE wasn't Win9x inside, it sure looked like one, and purportedly even had swap.

For example, the original 1984 Mac hardcoded the screen resolution to 512x384 black & white so they had to rewrite QuickDraw just three years later to add color, different resolutions, and multiple monitors. Classic Mac OS was easy to crash because it had no memory protection.

In 1996 Palm OS had hardcoded screen resolution with no color support. They had no memory protection. Palm also used already-obsolete DragonBall/68K processors when faster ARMs were already available.

I think he talks about a very different era

Reply on news.ycombinator.com