Back in the day if you wanted to develop for PalmOS you had to pay Metroworks (IIRC) $~300 for their CodeWarrior C++ compiler, so the fact that XCode is free is a pretty big improvement.
We also had prc-tools, a free GCC based toolchain. I used it to build a tweaked version of pssh and some other stuff. It was a lot more straightforward than modern Android or iOS development.
I don't think you could do that on PalmPilots either. You're taking a cool story about use and history of the PalmPilot and turning it into Yet Another iPhone Complaint Thread.
Not trying to start an iPhone complaint thread. iPhone has been my preferred phone for many years, and continues to be so.
I am still disappointed at having such a powerful piece of hardware in my pocket and not being able to write and run a native application for the device, on the device.
Many years ago, when smartphones first became a thing, I had certain expectations about what would be possible and yet here we are over a decade later and it’s still not possible to do that thing, simply because Apple doesn’t want us to be able to do it.
I think we should continue to talk about this until the day comes where it becomes possible.
I too am disappointed at having a computer in my pocket I don't truly own.
But I'm also disappointed at how HN seems to only have like 5 topics people want to discuss and the comments on every submission find their way back to those topics no matter how tenuous.
>But I'm also disappointed at how HN seems to only have like 5 topics people want to discuss and the comments on every submission find their way back to those topics no matter how tenuous.
doesn't that just point to the impact and magnitude of the perceived problem?
"Yeah, I know the kitchen is on fire, but let's talk about how the pancakes taste."
'group-attention' migrates back to the collective concern; seems unsurprising, espescially in the face of being reminded of a product that had these concerns handled well compared to our future selves.
Yes I have done embedded programming. But that’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about building and compiling regular iOS apps on iOS itself.
The HP 100/200 LX certainly could. It had a serial port built in and could PCMCIA a parallel port. With DOS 5.0 and software you could build a controller for all sorts of things on two AA batteries, and people did.
I'm a mobile dev, so I have both an iPhone 13 Pro Max that I rarely use, and a Pixel 6 Pro that runs GrapheneOS, which is what I prefer. Diffr't strokes.
Actually it is a lot better in this regard. You can write and compile code on the device. You can compile apks on any other device and install it on the phone. You never have to go thru google, unlike in Iphone.
Linux on Mobile was pretty much that. The movement kinda died when Nokia died, but has been seeing a lot of activity again the last couple of years. It's mostly community-maintained projects like postmarketOS.
I find a few things are missing for such an OS to be a daily driver, but there's definitely hope, and there's definitely a place where anyone interested can contribute.
The word used should be “simulates”, not “emulates”.
The software is designed to mimic the look and feel of the old projectionist software (which ran on PP). It does not in any way emulate PalmOS or the PP hardware.
> It does not in any way emulate PalmOS or the PP hardware.
Citation? Here’s IMAX Engineering confirming that it’s emulating a Palm Pilot.
“The original Quick Turn Reel Units operated on Palm Pilots. In advance of the release of Oppenheimer, IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists,” an IMAX spokesperson told Motherboard.
That's not a quote from IMAX engineering. That's a quote from an IMAX spokesperson of what engineering said. And in the game of telephone something is lost along the way. I would guess they meant: IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured a system that emulates the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists. But mixed it up in a way that means something different to us techies.
If we assume simplicity/safety trumps other considerations for a solution rolled out just before the year’s biggest release, “emulator” is probably correct and “emulates look and feel” is a spokesperson mischaracterization.
There are PalmOS emulators out there, wouldn't make sense for them to roll their own instead of licensing one of those. I had one on my last Android phone that was a treat for using my beloved old Palm apps.
I suspect the HN crowd's interpretation is correct that they merely replicated the look and feel. Which makes sense - Palm is still the best GUI I've ever been fortunate enough to use.
It's likely that whatever emulators already existed didn't support whatever custom hardware is in place to interface the Palm Pilot with the IMAX projection hardware.
Fair enough. But I still can't seeing them committing the resources to build an emulator from scratch. It would take ages to achieve stability and work out all the bugs. Anyone doing this would go find a platform that's already 85% of the way there and tailor to fit.
To skip operator retraining? At least that's how I read team "it's only look and feel, not an emulator". My objection to that would be that a hypothetical outcome of a modern UI with identical menu layout not being good enough would be one of those things that you only ever learn the hard way. But who knows, perhaps it was a new UI that was vetoed out by someone in a very powerful position and then they had to skin it up. But the far more likely explanation is that they had software, were running out of hardware devices to put in projection time until someone tried their hand on running one of the numerous palm emulators in existence on an RPi or similar.
I wonder why they chose Palm, but then why not, and what else would they use? Ipaq?
It's not clear, but I assume it sends commands to the actual film hardware, and its not doing some real-time control.
"The software shows a handful of controls for the projectionist to queue up the film and control the platters that feed film at six feet per second. " [0]
Palm was the market leader, it would have been the obvious choice. Palm had been around since 1996 and by 1998 had sold 30 million devices [1]. PocketPC didn’t come out until 2000, in 2001 they had only sold 1.25 million devices, equating to less than 10% market share [2]. From what I remember Palm Pilots were the go to choice for PDAs, they were simple and worked. Other devices had come and gone. It would have been odd if they chosen something else. I doubt anyone was thinking it would be used for 20 years, though I don’t think people would have thought it would go away at the time.
I was thinking it’s not actually an obvious choice for controlling hardware. It was either an interesting choice that was small and didn’t need a lot of components, compared to the obvious PLC. Or it seemed like an obvious choice to someone that didn’t know better.[1] Either way, someone probably made a good decision to keep the old system maintainable by emulating the palm pilot instead of replacing it.
Mind you, it’s not clear how much of the control is done by the palm pilot. For all I know, it’s not much more than a screen connected to a PLC. But my gut feeling is it’s actually doing at least some of the control to be worth emulating and keeping the original software.
[1]You see this a ton now, with people reinventing the wheel using arduino, raspberry pi and spark fun parts to automate something in the small business they are employed at. Because they know these things as hobbyists, but they and anyone around were never exposed to PLCs. Soon after they leave, a newer employee will rebuild from scratch, maybe using ESP32. Overall the lifetime cost is probably much higher. Meanwhile a PLC from 1990 is fairly easy to maintain, repair or replace (including porting the software).
The costs could be as you say. And a arduino may last 25 years but a cheap power adapter janky wiring soldered to a hobbyist proximity switch will not.
I was thinking more of a scenario where a young engineer at least knows what a PLC is and buys $1k of stuff from automation direct. And starting from a PLC/googling about PLCs will lead you down a path of PLC cabinets, high quality power supplies, labeled wires and industrial limit switches. Vs another engineer that only knows the world of arduino and messes of wires in boxes.
In the first case, when he or she leaves and the thing breaks down, the next person can either call or pro or have a chance to connect to the PLC, do some troubleshooting with the ladder logic and figure out which sensor needs to be replaced. In the second case there’s probably no documentation and the source code is long gone so the only thing to do is scrap it and start over, probably incurring a large cost because now it’s an emergency to get the thing working again, and/or it causes lost production. I failed to mention earlier I wasn’t just talking about the cost of parts.
I’m not saying the imax solution may be so bad in the “arduino direction”, but thinking about it for me thinking about some professional experiences I’ve seen in both directions.
In my experience, hacked together arduino projects easily exceed a 25 year MTBF (if you exclude day-1 failures because someone did something stupid like wiring it backwards).
However, ESP32's do not (they seem to require a power cycle every few months - and in my view, that is a failure). R Pi's certainly do not (they require human attention for software updates, which IMO is also a failure - and even if you don't update them, there is almost certainly some tiny memory leak and it'll need a reboot in a year or two anyway).
That device specifically was cheap and readily available. If it failed you could have gone to any OfficeMax or Circuit City and picked up a replacement.
I assume at least one engineer aggressively argued for DB9 serial along with a Windows and Mac app instead and lost.
It was clear that the longevity of the installations would far outstrip the longevity of the Palm pilot
If I was in the room I'd even argue for DOS. As a target it had stopped moving, was ubiquitous, not going anywhere and is in enough important places that it would even survive the demise of Microsoft if they were to collapse in the future
"Yes, there's plenty of Windows CE and DOS palmtops. You can make a palmpilot application if you want but that should be a port, just like to BeOS.
The pure serial binary option is fine but this is infrastructure. Like the bridges that run on 5 1/4" disks, this will outlive both us and Palm if we do it right. Hell, if this is still running when our grandchildren are old and grey, this will be one of our greatest achievements as a team.
When I walk down the street and I see a masonry stamp on the sidewalk from a contracting company that installed it 100 years ago, I appreciate the fine work they did that I'm still using a century later.
Let's hope people will feel the same way about what we decide to do in this room today.
We need to at least provide documentation on the protocol.
It has to be made so competent people in the future can easily make this system accessible to the computers of the future as well. That will Not best be handled by a binary blob on a palmpilot"
Saying it should have been Windows CE is just survivorship bias IMO - and we don’t know that they didn’t write documentation on the protocol or that it’s poorly understood - it might just have been easier and safer to emulate an app that everyone is happy with rather than rewrite it (these film projectors might be more in “keep them alive” mode rather than “improve” mode while digital is growing for them).
I’ve put a dos application running in an emulator on an android device for a project to roll out new hardware because that took a few hours to configure rather than a year of development.
Did you you ever attempt programming anything under PalmOs back then? It was quite fragile because of the extremely low amount of memory on board, which forced the use of relocatable memory handles, a bit like classic mac OS.
PalmOS and it's extreme focus on low end hardware was a super weird choice at the time. The one reason for using PalmOS was extreme battery life, which obviously was not a factor here.
There existed plenty better alternatives at the time.
I think it's a bit unfair to say "for aesthetic reasons".
The article says it's because projectionists are familiar with the Palm Pilot UI (because to them it's just another tool), and rather than get them to re-learn a different UI, they used emulation to provide the same familiar UI on newer hardware.
We (technology/digital experts) take for granted our level of comfort in sussing out how a new UI works.
I don't say it lightly. It's trivial to remove the process entirely. The whole point of this style of projection is that it's as much theatre as the theatre itself. It's kept, including the aesthetic of the Pilot device itself, purely for nostalgic decoration and little more!
I think this is basically similar to the tension between if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and the desire to improve (or if you like, recreate, iterate, etc) what exists.
They definitely did. My brother was happy to get my ibm branded palm pilot (WorkPad) because it would interface with serial obd-ii dongles. And the ice rink where my kiddo plays hockey has a scoreboard that was sold with a palm pilot to control it (someone in the beer league built replacement software for a PC when palm pilots became hard to source)
thats exactly why. It was a simple serial connection that could connect directly with other simple embedded systems. My local Lowes home store had a palm pilot that controlled their security system, and it was still in use just pre-COVID for exactly the same reason.
iPAQ ran Windows Mobile (a derivative of windows CE). I believe custom drivers were not well supported.
As well, back around 2009 I looked into Windows CE for a hobby project I thought about commercializing, and the licensing costs were INSANE. IIRC, there was a revenue component too.
While I don’t recall all specifics, I believe using Windows Mobile in an industrial use case it violated the EULA and you’d need to use a proper Windows CE env.
Total total guess here, but I wonder if they were tied to Windows CE, still paying licensing costs, given how few “true” imax screens there are, if the base licensing costs they’d have locked into 20 years ago, would’ve made “true” imax screens unprofitable/ have retired them at the onset of the pandemic
Idunno, Microsoft jumped through hoops to get folks ported to Windows Mobile. The problem was that WinCE was just vastly... more. At some point it essentially just looked like Windows. App development was quite straightforward. Mobile, on the other hand, was powerful but complex. And Mobile also had a really high bar for certification.
We definitely used Mobile in industrial use cases but WinCE was much, much easier to certify and much cheaper to keep around on old SKUs and LTS contracts.
Breaking orbit and sailing off on a tangent: I miss the Palm Pilot's Graffiti text-input system — I'd much rather have that than any of the various keyboards and swiping systems on the iPhone / iPad.
The iPad now has handwriting recognition in arbitrary text fields. You can just pick up the Apple Pencil and start writing somewhere. It’ll fill in with text as you write.
Based on my memory of Graffiti input speed, it was faster than modern smartphones once I account for all the time I spend correcting typos on virtual keyboards.
Back in the Palm era, virtual keyboards were indeed very prone to typos. But now days the autocorrect is so good on modern devices, it’s rare for it to make mistakes.
Of course, the same autocorrect tech could be applied to Graffiti on a modern device[1] But fundamentally, making a stroke gesture to enter a character will always be slower than tapping a keyboard.
You can find all kinds of interesting emulator implementations out there. I’ve personally seen a large manufacturing shop run some of their core business processes inside DOSBox.
I worked with a large factory running all their lines and processes off an emulated, embedded controller. It was running on a desktop PC using NT 3.51 interfacing directly with real-world I/O.
I developed some PalmPilot applications, though they never went anywhere. I used Pocket C, which was a simplistic but workable environment that was interpreted on the device. I was also using IBM ThinkPads for factory controls around the same time period.
The PalmPilot had nice tiny form factor, probably its primary asset. A second benefit is that it had no fan. It was pretty typical for fan / heat / dust problems to bring down long-term software installations, along with the lifespan of CRT displays. Something like an IBM PC clone, if un-maintained, was good for at most a few years.
The PalmPilot hardware port was conventional RS232, so it was easy to mate it with outboard hardware. On later PP's, when they went to USB, I was able to interface them through the IR data port.
I miss using my Palm Pilot III. I still keep an emulator with the rom and my last data backup around, once in a blue moon I need to pull something off of it still. The graffiti input system worked great, I could enter data way faster than with any smart phone. I used to take lots of notes on the spot with it for work and personal use, but now I'm reduced to taking photos of any text data I need to save for later. I've used Palm and Blackberry through the years, and somehow the input devices that survived are the worst possible that could have survived. Everything that came before smart phone keyboards was better. The Palm Pilot was a more civilized tool for a more civilized time.
Now I have huge FOMO and don't have a city close to me to see it. I haven't seen a movie in theatres in years and it would have been nice to treat myself to this one.
3. Dual Laser IMAX (4K, can show the full 1.43/1 picture instead of just 1.9/1)
4. Single laser IMAX (4K, shows 1.9/1)
5. Dolby Cinema (4K, aspect ratio probably 2.39/1, not sure)
6. 35mm film
7. Non-laser IMAX
8. Regular theater
(1) is the most special, (2) is still quite special as only every few years do these theaters typically bring out 70mm projectors, (3) is also pretty special because rarely do movies return to IMAX where you can see the full uncropped image. (4) and (5) will still have great picture and sound quality compared to almost any home setup (OLED has contrast advantage always). (6) is pretty special, as [0] says: The 35mm prints have been made photochemically, preserving all the rich analog color of the original 65mm photography. (7) will have a big screen and good sound. (8) regular theaters are still good too. The value of the movie-going experience is not insignificant, which you get at any theater.
> The value of the movie-going experience is not insignificant, which you get at any theater.
Not arguing, just curious: what do you perceive the value to be in going to a (8) plain 'ol regular theater? As opposed to something like a 65" OLED in your living room.
65" OLED is fantastic (better color, contrast, resolution). One thing is that you get to see the movie sooner. May or may not be a big deal. Another is that you get a big screen with few distractions around (hopefully). Something about being in the dark room with the big screen makes the experience more memorable and immersive. You've got your popcorn. You can recreate all that at home to a large extent though. There's also something to the communal aspect -- it's at least a little intriguing to look around and see who else is at the movie. Sometimes it's a great crowd during the showing and there's laughter and applause and gasps, and that adds something to the experience. Sometimes you strike up a conversation with somebody afterward. You also get the experience of intentionally going out. Maybe you meet or bring some friends or family, maybe you get some ice cream afterward (I've also gone to a few movies alone, and that's its own interesting experience). I guess that's mostly all to say it's a little more fun. I also have some notion which is probably a little silly of supporting the thing I'm seeing. This especially applies to movies like Shin Kamen Rider, which I made sure to catch in the one or two days it was playing in the US.
I think it's partly the shared event and ritual. You're taking part in something with hundreds of other people, and a lot of effort goes in to making it just right (with a good projectionist and a cinema that gives a shit)
If anyone currently in Hamburg, Germany plans to watch this movie, the movie theater "Savoy" (seems to be independent - no chain) offers the Oppenheimer movie in original English language (no dubs/subs) in the original 70mm version.
I think I'm gonna attend next week.
Edit: I'm seeing the list above which claims there are no German cinemas who have the original 70mm film. However this[0] German cinema in Hamburg clearly claims to have original 70mm version ("OV"). Not sure if I either misunderstand something, the list is incorrect, or if the cinema is lying?
Digital IMAX is pointless, but it is still technically "MAX" as the max is for physical size, not resolution.
The original reason IMAX uses 70mm film (8.3x the area of 35mm) is because projecting onto a larger screen required a more powerful lamp, which would produce more heat and burn 35mm film, so they had to place it farther away from the lamp, meaning the film had to be larger.
Yes, I meant "Nice" as in "it's nice that they went through the extra effort to release it in the rare, high quality medium available, and not a format that's worse than what I can watch at home".
> The original reason IMAX uses 70mm film (8.3x the area of 35mm) is because projecting onto a larger screen required a more powerful lamp
70mm is also much higher resolution. Modern digital can compete with 35mm, but to my knowledge there's nothing out there that competes with 70mm yet.
I think that IMAX has really struggled with branding confusion as the majority of "IMAX" branded screens are slightly larger regular screens and not the true experience that IMAX can be. There's only a few dozen IMAX 15-perf 70mm film theatres in 1.43 aspect ratio worldwide, some more digital 4K IMAX multi-laser in 1.43 which are also quite good, and then the vast majority of other "IMAX" screens are digital IMAX Xenon which is usually just a slightly bigger screen than a traditional theatre (but still not the 1.43 ratio the filmmaker intended).
I think IMAX Xenon as well as general confusion about which systems are in use at which theatres and which movies are filmed in which format has led to a ton of frustration with the brand, even though when everything is just right they can produce some really incredible experiences.
Then even for Oppenheimer there is a lot of technical troubles going on for the film theatres... The top of /r/imax has stories of people who flew cross country to see it in the best format they could and then had the projector bonk out 20 minutes in.
I think that, post-COVID, a lot of people have realized that a good home video theatre is very affordable, lots of movies are going to streaming either direct or very quickly, and that modern 4K HDR OLED TVs can be absolutely gorgeous. I don't have a lot of motivation to go to a standard theatre screening these days, but IMAX is an experience you can't get at home though so I hope it stays around.
To add more to the confusion, there's also single-laser IMAX, which gives you a 4K picture in a 1.9 to 1 aspect ratio. Taller than standard 2.39 to 1, but not the full IMAX.
> Meanwhile, 70 mm IMAX film releases like Oppenheimer don't come often, and when they do, only 30 theaters in the world can support them, CNBC reported, and not necessarily all of them will (Tenet's 70 mm release, for example, was limited to 11 theaters due to pandemic restrictions, CNBC said). That makes any need for upgrades and overhauls less urgent.
IMAX 70mm is still the absolute benchmark for film quality, and has been so for decades. A really rough estimate is you'd need a 15-20k digital projector to approach the resolution of the film.
However, IMAX tried to go mass-market around 2008 and that's why you see so many supposedly-IMAX theaters now.
They typically use 2K DLP projectors. Yeah, basically the same res as a gaming PC from 2011.
My theater has the crummy 2k digital, and let em tell you, you can DEFINITELY see the pixels. I would call it passable but it's not really great at all. The only benefit of these IMAX locations is that normal digital cinema can be even worse!
There are newer 4k laser projectors that some theaters are retrofitting into their old huge IMAX locations, but these still aren't going to hold a candle. 4k still isn't even enough to really come close to 35mm.
Consider also that resolution is only one factor. Bandwidth is another. Digital movies are often full of compression artefacts, especially when there's a lot going on in the scene.
That's true; with a cap of 250 Mbps for the DCP stream, and a 4K frame size of 4096 × 2160, that's ~28 bits per pixel (if the soundtrack is disregarded). There might be a small amount of subsampling or run length encoding going on, but it's entirely plausible to distribute and play an uncompressed film on a professional projector.
EDIT: Forgot to factor frame rate into the math. Divide that by 24 frames per second. That got me curious, so I looked into it and found they're using JPEG 2000 on each frame with no inter-frame deltas. Essentially like a constant stream of I-frames.
From that link, it looks like they do compress and use JPEG2000 for it, with a max bit-rate of 250 mbit/s. IIRC 4k blu rays don't do more than 100 mbit/s, so that's quite a bit better.
A 135 photographic film frame (distinct from 35mm movie film) roughly has about 24MP - 48MP digital equivalent resolution.
That has a photographic area of 864 square millimeters.
70mm movie film has 3395 square millimeters. That's like 943MP - 1886MP digital equivalent, if we use the same standards as 135 photographic film frame.
There's no way you can replicate that amount of quality with digital cinema, at least right now.
IMAX is similar in size to 6x7 medium format photography, which only recently has been fully replaced by digital cameras. The cameras that replace medium format photography (usually used for stuff like magazine cover photos, high end product photography, high end portraits and other high quality still applications) range from the sony a7r4 with a 61MP sensor, hasselblad cameras with 100mp sensors and phase one with a 150MP sensor.
The digital video equivalent is 16K, which exists but it's just not common at all.
A lot of "IMAX" theaters (and movies) are digital...but not those films created by Christopher Nolan. I love his movies, but he's an analog snob and believes the only legitimate place to enjoy his analog tech films is in a theater. I'm not saying he's entirely wrong, 70mm IMAX is probably the best film experience out there. But it's an ideal many moviegoers can't enjoy.
To be fair, he recently said that 70mm IMAX format is also ideal as master for any downstream format, because all the information you're ever going to have for that movie is in the negative. And with the length (and therefore the size) of the movie, he acknowledges he may at last have reached the limits of analog film technology.
>he's an analog snob and believes the only legitimate place to enjoy his analog tech films is in a theater
He is like that in interviews, but it's worth noting that a lot of care is put into making great digital versions of his movies too. I'm not familiar with how involved he is in that process, but I would hazard a guess he's pretty involved.
The Oppenheimer site mentions this:
The Digital Cinema presentation of OPPENHEIMER has been created from 8k scans of the photochemically color-graded film elements, scaled to 4K, fine-tuned in the digital realm to maximize the color and contrast attributes of digital projectors, and dust-busted to achieve the cleanest and most stable image presentation possible. The film was finished in 4k for the highest digital resolution currently available.
Why does anything need anything. It's a film, a piece of art - if they want to record it in 80K resolution for the fun of it, the question should be - why not?
There is a saying by German film maker Alexander Kluge:
He who wants to express something has to in turn impress something.
And having the resolution of 70mm film certainly helps with the impeession part. Whether artistic expression is actually needed is a different more philosophic question. I'd say yes, but I studied art, so I am biased.
That may be the best answer (it was a serious question). The explosion in the film is layered small-scale petrol explosions [1], but more visible detail may help sell it as bigger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apkOZrgueLQ
"PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME"