PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

https://github.com/migueletto/PumpkinOS

by rickcarlino • 2 years ago

405 135 2 years ago

github.com

Terretta2• 2 years ago

Graffiti: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amigueletto%2FPumpkinOS+gr...

Terretta2• 2 years ago

I see downvotes on the code search for whether this includes Graffiti, the best pen/stylus input for writing ...

Other than "fitaly", which was even better:

https://the-gadgeteer.com/1998/08/22/fitaly_review/

duskwuff• 2 years ago

Also possibly of interest: rePalm, a project to run PalmOS on ARM microcontrollers like the RP2040 - http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm

sillywalk3• 2 years ago

More HN discussion on PumpkinOS

PumpkinOS / 3 years ago|52 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28466858

Related discussion on rePalm:

PalmOS on Raspberry Pi 169 points by Tijdreiziger on Sept 10, 2021 | 86 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28487817

verdagon• 2 years ago

This PumpkinOS project is pretty incredible. I can't imagine how much effort it would take to be compatible with all the system calls that the average Palm app would expect. I remember Palm did some truly weird things with memory: anything moderately large would need to be put into a special memory block that the OS could rearrange at will, and one would need to lock the block's handle to keep it stable while accessing it. Stuff like that must have been challenging (and fun) to implement in PumpkinOS.

This brings me back. I used to make little games for Palm OS, and I was so excited for the next version of the OS which would let one use the (then new) Palm OS Development Suite to make programs. It was also the last OS I've used where an app had a central event loop. Everything else today has UI frameworks that handle it for you. Things are easier now, but I still miss it.

jsheard• 2 years ago

anything moderately large would need to be put into a special memory block that the OS could rearrange at will, and one would need to lock the block's handle to keep it stable while accessing it

Didn't 16-bit Windows and classic Mac OS do something similar? If you're doing multitasking on a system without an MMU then I think that kind of live heap defragmentation would have been practically required.

wmf• 2 years ago

Palm was started by ex-Apple people and borrowed a lot of ideas and mistakes from the Mac.

xmm• 2 years ago

Classic MacOS did, but it's definitely not something needed for multitasking without an MMU. For instance AmigaOS didn't do this, but instead effectively had a single shared heap.

kmeisthax• 2 years ago

Yes. The idea wasn't to get away with not having an MMU, though - it was to get away with shipping the Mac with an ungodly low amount of RAM for a machine with a GUI. I believe the original idea was to ship with like 64k or something?

Obviously, with the state of mobile hardware back then relocatable blocks were also similarly necessary in order to save RAM.

For anyone wondering, no, this isn't the thing that made classic Mac OS unfit for multitasking. The MMU is necessary to keep applications from writing other apps' heaps, not to do memory defragmentation. You can do some cool software-transparent defragmentation tricks with MMUs, but if you're deciding what the ABI looks like ahead of time, then you can just make everyone carry double-pointers to everything.

MaulingMonkey• 2 years ago

Didn't 16-bit Windows and classic Mac OS do something similar?

I assume this is what `{Local,Global}{Lock,Unlock}` were for when combined with `{Local,Global}Alloc({L,G}MEM_MOVEABLE)`

Similar idioms occasionally persist in modern code - e.g. when dealing with FFI in GCed languages (C#'s `fixed` statement pins memory in place.)

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

Windows 16 bit did, but it required a MMU anyway, at least since Windows 3, that was its big feature, 16 bit protected mode and a VM mode for running MS-DOS.

grishka• 2 years ago

It was also the last OS I've used where an app had a central event loop.

Windows is still like that if you use Win32 APIs directly.

All GUI toolkits ever made are like that, but in most of the modern ones, this queue and loop are usually internal and you can only infer their existence by looking at the stack in a debugger or when something crashes.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

Windows is still like that if you use Win32 APIs directly.

Which is basically the only option for C and C++ developers, when using vanilla Visual Studio, unless they want to write libraries to be consumed by .NET instead, or use a third party framework.

It is either raw Win32 or MFC, don't even bother with WinUI.

p_l2• 2 years ago

Windows doesn't actually have a central event loop, which makes it pretty unique.

macOS/iOS/etc have a central event loop in Cocoa - what more only initial thread is allowed to talk with windowserver!

Xlib pretty much enforced single event loop per connection - XCB allowed more.

In comparison, win32 applications can create an event loop ("message pump") per thread, and you can use GUI calls completely independently on them.

NegativeLatency3• 2 years ago

One nice thing about modern hardware would be that you wouldn't exactly be memory constrained. You'd get to implement a complicated API with whatever large size chunk of memory you wanted, since 128 MB of ram or how ever much they came with is peanuts today.

toast02• 2 years ago

since 128 MB of ram or how ever much they came with is peanuts today.

The first Palm (Pilot 1000) had 128 kB. I think the biggest 68k Palm was the Palm Vx with 8MB. Towards the end of the (Intel) ARM Palms, they did have 128 MB models though.

jeanchen• 2 years ago

I loved Palm games! Those were the best mobile games, nothing modern compares to them at all.

Someone4• 2 years ago

I remember Palm did some truly weird things with memory: anything moderately large would need to be put into a special memory block that the OS could rearrange at will, and one would need to lock the block's handle to keep it stable while accessing it. Stuff like that must have been challenging (and fun) to implement in PumpkinOS.

That’s extremely easy on modern hardware with gigabytes of RAM (compared to 2 megabytes on the pal pilot III): just use malloc, never move memory around, and make locking and unlocking such blocks no-ops. If there is an OS call to determine lock state, you’ll have to store that somewhere, but that isn’t difficult, either.

It also isn’t hard to implement the way they did back then; it ‘just’ complicates using it.

tensor2• 2 years ago

I remember investing in Palm thinking that they'd eventually be the ones to build something like the iphone. Sadly, they didn't and when apple did that was it for them.

mrbluecoat• 2 years ago

Yeah, the GPL license cracked me up on this one. Can't imagine there's a danger of commercialization here..

seszett• 2 years ago

GPL isn't about commercialization though, it allows commercialization. It's all about preventing closed-source forks.

ianburrell2• 2 years ago

One big problem is that Palm split into PalmSource for software and Palm One for hardware. PalmSource went off to design Linux-based OS, got acquired, and disappeared. Palm One, renamed back to Palm One, made some early smartphones with PalmOS. But PalmOS was pretty obsolete by then, with 16-bit apps running on 32-bit OS.

Then Palm developed webOS, which made some weird hardware decisions and couldn't compete with iPhone and Android. But it could have been a contender, better than Blackberry and Nokia that didn't make jump to capacitive screens.

I think Palm's problem was being too late, but if they hadn't split and made PalmOS successor, they would have missed capacitive smartphones.

tensor2• 2 years ago

WebOS is great, at least it lives on in LG products for now. I far prefer it to android, despite the vastly smaller ecosystem.

hedgehog• 2 years ago

webOS was really nice, a lot of ideas that didn't come to iOS and Android until much later were present and nicely implemented back in 2010 or so.

lxgr5• 2 years ago

They did have the Treo line!

Arguably, what ultimately brought Palm down was their early success and the huge library of existing shareware and freeware tools:

They desperately needed to try something new (Palm OS was just showing its age as a single-threaded, in-RAM, non-virtual-memory-based OS), but couldn't, since it would have alienated long-time fans by stranding their existing software libraries.

They could never work their way through that chicken-and-egg problem (and all of the split ups (OS vs. hardware), forks/spin-offs (Handspring), and re-mergers didn't help either) until it was too late: Cobalt OS never saw any devices, and the Pre was an ambitious new start but would have had a tough time against the iPhone even if it would have launched earlier than that.

floating-io• 2 years ago

Wasn't that Handspring rather than palm?

[edit: referring to Treo specifically, not the rest...]

causality0• 2 years ago

I'm going to blame it on Palm's flat refusal to move onto PalmOS 6. Every time a new device came out and it was still on PalmOS 5 the whole community was like "what the fuck are you doing?"

fragmede2• 2 years ago

I think it was their lack of vertical integration that did it. there were too many pieces that every developer needed to do, that made it really hard to make apps for it. compare that to the app store where Apple just takes a 30% cut, which is steep, but they do things for that 30%. On the consumer end of things, the actually affordable data plan with att at launch, which is more vertical integration, rather than letting the carriers do their thing, is what did it, imo.

wpietri• 2 years ago

They did have the Treo line!

Thank you for mentioning it. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about how Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. I had a series of Treos starting with the Treo 270: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_270

As somebody who carried a Palm for years, it was so amazing to suddenly have the internet in my pocket. It still is, really.

snom380• 2 years ago

Apple was able to manage this with a much bigger market and a lot more apps (when transitioning to OS X), so while it would be hard, I think Palm could have been able to do that as well.

But as you say, the company structure, market position and a lot more worked against them (same thing with Nokia and Symbian).

Brian_K_White• 2 years ago

Samsung SPH-i300, 7 years before iphone 1, and iphone 1 didn't even have apps.

I loved that thing. Audibl.com player app, 3rd party apps to integrate phone dialer and contacts db, internet... 14.4k internet but internet! email, browser, ssh and irc clients, even a vnc client, thousands of random apps for every little thing like today, color grid icon home screen, touch screen, sdcard, in 2000 or 2001.

wazoox2• 2 years ago

I had the whole Handspring / Palm smartphone line : Visor + Visor Phone, then Treo 270, then Treo 600, then the Treo 650, and finally the Palm Pré.

They were no iPhone, but they were extremely efficient work tools.

bonyt• 2 years ago

I've heard blame partially put on carriers - they initially resisted even carrying the Treo line without putting limits on what Handspring could do with it.

Apple had the iPod - and, crucially, customers - could bring these customers to the carriers, and so they could dictate more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9_Vh9h3Ohw (the part I'm referencing is about 20 minutes in).

tangus• 2 years ago

Also of interest: CloudpilotEmu - Palm emulator in your browser

https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/

When I installed it and could play Vexed again... ahh, the happiness!

lxgr5• 2 years ago

Cloudpilot is amazing, one of the most sophisticated PWAs I'm aware of! I haven't heard of Vexed, but for me, bringing back Space Trader made me very happy.

anthk3• 2 years ago

You can play it freely (as in Freedom) under Android:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.brucelet.spacetrader/

AstroJetson2• 2 years ago

I was a Sprint customer from the start of the Palm phone era. Up until 2 years ago I was using colored Treo’s for my phone. I loved that mechanical keyboard it was so nice to use. ( I have slightly deformed fingers that make it hard for touch screens.). Merger with T-M killed the radio part. So sad to see it go.

smm112• 2 years ago

I think I used to work with you. You stated the Pre was the "iPhone killer" about six months after the iPhone came out, and Android phones appeared. You showed our deparment's first iPhone user the non-awesome stuff the Pre did by comparison, then stated that Palm's millions of users would show me.

They sure did.

AstroJetson2• 2 years ago

Nope, I was the guy that had Palm Pilots, got my whole Architecture group Palm pilots and we used to beam messages at each other in meetings. I became good at graffiti writing, my printing today looks like it. The Palm phones was a natural extension of that.

My first one was the 180 model, with the flip front cover. I did a quick check, I had my first Palm Phone in 2002-3, iPhones came out in 2007.

thot_experiment• 2 years ago

So hype to lose some hours playing Space Trader. I had a Palm Vx in middle school and I have some very fond memories of playing that game under my desk in class.

alsobrsp• 2 years ago

I have two Palm Vx in the garage. I love that game too.

anthk3• 2 years ago

For Android:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.brucelet.spacetrader/

angst_ridden• 2 years ago

I worked with Peter Spronck and created the last add-ons and a few quests to Space Trader (e.g. The Scarab). I miss those days!

homero• 2 years ago

Would be fun on Android

ethanpil• 2 years ago

What would it take to get this on modern (or even last generation) phone hardware?

I bet we could do everything we want with tremendous simplicity and out of this world battery life... Probably would make a PinePhone feel like a Rolls Royce.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

that is one helluva nerdsnipe

redundantly• 2 years ago

It would be nice if more effort was put into the optomisation and stabilisation on modern mobile operating systems.

smith7018• 2 years ago

According to the README, it runs natively on ARM but it looks more like a program than an OS. So I'm sure it can be updated to run on Android or iOS if the GUI code is rewritten with their respective frameworks but making a bootable OS seems more difficult. The author wrote an article last year about making it a bootable OS by using a barebones x86 kernel and QEMU so I'm sure it could probably be repurposed for ARM devices. [1]

https://pmig96.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/pumpkinos-busybox-an...

frellus• 2 years ago

Nothing made me feel older than going to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA and seeing a Palm Pilot in the display case.

It should be illegal to show things which were an integral part of your life, a short 30'ish years ago, as if they were uncovered in the ruins of some pre-civilization. Not fair at all.

codezero2• 2 years ago

I still have my original PalmPilot in a box in the attic. Its existence was a huge life lesson for me.

I asked my boss to pay for it (he did) but he said: do you use anything to organize your life and projects right now? If you don't, I don't think a PalmPilot will help you.

He was so right.

astrange• 2 years ago

I read a lot of ebooks on mine.

bouncing• 2 years ago

I find that often, having a tool that enhances something you never did doesn’t make you start doing that thing.

But there are exceptions. I never had an address book or calendar until I had a Palm Pilot. It might have just been that I was becoming an adult at the time, but part of it was probably a barrier to use factor. The Palm was a small thing I could carry to class, keep near my phone, bring to my internship job, etc. It and the need for organizing did conspire to make it my first real organizer and my first time having that information organized at all.

johnwalkr• 2 years ago

On Reddit a few months ago there was a post about someone finding their grandfather’s old gameboy.

therealfiona• 2 years ago

To be fair, by grandfather had a Nintendo DS.

tomashubelbauer• 2 years ago

This one's funny because on one hand you have young people finding their grandparents Game Boys in the attic but on the other you'll have kids of the same age recording YouTube videos about GB modding, because that scene is still huge, diverse and very lively.

vineyardmike• 2 years ago

As someone who had a gameboy growing up, and now a child, I had to quickly do some math to console myself that I'm not yet "Grandfather" age. This is simply a (now) old man who had fun toys as a (normal age) adult.

akho• 2 years ago

Imagine them finding their grandfather's current PS5.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

Now imagine what I feel when seeing paper tapes, 8" floppies, assemble kits for Z80 in such museums.

On the other hand, there some special sense of nostalagia for what I was doing back on those days.

finaard3• 2 years ago

I still have a section on my homepage about how to create and flash custom ROMs for the Palm Vx - and somewhat surprisingly, I still now and then get emails from people asking for help with that.

PaulRobinson2• 2 years ago

At the Science Museum in London, there is a collection of mobiles phones, computers and consoles in one gallery. My partner and I take great joy in pointing out all the ones we've owned over the years, it's great fun to see them again.

donatj• 2 years ago

The Computer History Museum also has a Dreamcast on display and that bothered me way more because there is some unresolved traumatized part of my brain left from when I was a teen still actively waiting for Dreamcast to make it's big comeback

cmgbhm• 2 years ago

We had an org offsite there about 5y ago. The VP afterwards asks everyone what they most fondly remember.

One of the younger seniors says “I remember when my Dad used a palm pilot!” The room had the same experience.

wazoox2• 2 years ago

I still have my Visor with its VisorPhone module, the very first touch-only smartphone in existence, 5 years before the iPhone :) It was big, clunkly and relatively impractical (the Visor ran on 2 AA batteries, while the phone module had its own rechargeable battery) but the complete integration with Palm Desktop (later jPilot on Linux) was a breeze.

g19fanatic• 2 years ago

the Museum of Science and Technology (MOST) in Syracuse has a display regarding the history and tech of cell phones. Our children were also incredulous that the nokia brick was what passed as our first cell phones.

layer83• 2 years ago

Computer history museums seem so relatively recent that I almost expect there to be computer history museum history museums at some point.

sillywalk3• 2 years ago

I thought the 90s were maybe 10 years ago, tops.

yencabulator• 2 years ago

What made me feel extra old was being momentarily confused about how a Palm OS device had a display that wasn't green monochrome.

rkagerer• 2 years ago

My heart thumped faster when I read this headline. Please make it work on Android so I can 'replace' my daily driver and go back to a better time!

finaard3• 2 years ago

I still miss the calendar and contact apps from the Palm. I stuck with Palm up until the Centro - and haven't found contact/calendar apps I'm as happy with as the Palm versions yet. They're either missing some simple basic features, or the UI is needlessly complicated.

anthk3• 2 years ago

It uses SDL so it would be easy to port.

aagha• 2 years ago

You can have Graffiti!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...

nerpderp82• 2 years ago

You could run the whole thing in Wasm and have Palm apps running everywhere. It would be like how people are running DOS apps in webpages non ironically

DXXTHLOVESU• 2 years ago

So palm OS was an old mobile operating system, introduced around 1996, coded in C++... later extended to support smartphones?

Can someone please explain more to me about this OS as it seems pretty interesting, and I have never heard of it.

lproven2• 2 years ago

https://gprivate.com/6ahva

nottorp• 2 years ago

Who has the guts to click on that? :)

layer83• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_OS

https://palm.wiki/

amaccuish• 2 years ago

Weird to think that Amazon's kindle format used to be based on .mobi, itself based on the Palm's database file type.

PaulRobinson2• 2 years ago

I love this project existing and prolonging the life of all that software that would otherwise never have a chance to execute again, but is this about nostalgia or about a real need/desire for that software?

Given how much people wax lyrical about Palm, Blackberry, Psion, outside of niche applications (I know IMAX needs Palm emulators to run bits of that stack), do people genuinely yearn for going back to the old days?

I was looking around for a "modern" Psion 5, and spotted some of the team had come up with the Gemini PDA which looks a bit like one, but is Android based. Some reviewers definitely find this a drawback. You can imagine a new EPOC operating system with support for modern connectivity would be a slam dunk for them, but then I found myself thinking I'd mostly run Linux on it (if I could find a new one in stock anywhere with a UK keyboard).

But then, do we all really want that? There has been a lot of progress in the last 20+ years, and I can't help but feel if most people were offered PalmOS instead of Android or iOS as their daily driver it would be frustrating enough they'd hand it back within a week.

What's the killer feature that makes that statement false?

layer83• 2 years ago

I miss the weeks-long battery life, the simpler app designs, and the page-up/down buttons.

rrix2• 2 years ago

i've been looking forward to seeing this come together for a while now, very cool!

PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS

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