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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

Short of full-blown prototype boards (ESP32 ecosystem) and dev environments (Apple ecosystem), are there any modern day consumer-facing devices running on an obscure platform that also come with a hidden layer of an SDK?

I am thinking of the Cybiko, but that’s also contemporary to the Timex watch.

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Garmin watches have an SDK with their own entire goofy "Monkey C" language and an entire bytecode VM to run it. It's not "hidden" I guess (there's an app store), but neither was this Timex one.

https://www.atredis.com/blog/2020/11/4/garmin-forerunner-235...

Somewhere, a lone programmer in a hardware engineering org is having the time of their life.

Ruputer/OnHand PC? Another smartwatch from late 90's/early 2000s. The specs were on part with the original Mac, 128KB RAM, with 102x64 pixel display and 2MB of flash, but VERY sluggish OS and poor battery life (but still better than modern smartwatches).

Maybe Palm and Psion devices count? I would exclude WinCE...

Ah yes http://pconhand.com I drooled over it as a teen. But the price was to high for me.

i could never get used to the psion 5mx keyboard. it was just a little too small. the treo thumb-board wasn't ideal, but it worked well enough. FWIW, PalmOS was HEAVILY influenced by MacOS classic. I mean, at least they changed the variable names in the debug images.

oh man. i remember being tempted by the cybikos 20 years ago. but now you can't find a working one on eBay. maybe i could make something similar with low-power nordic or ti btle chips and a MSP430 w/ an lcd driver.

Not first-party, but calculators?

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