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Comment by rythie | Hacker News Reader

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.

[1] https://history-computer.com/palm-pilot-guide/ [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pocket-pc-sales-1-million-and-...

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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).

I was also curious how much control it has, or if it's sort of a front-end to a PLC or microcontroller.

You just said with a straight face that the lifetime cost of a PLC was below that of an Arduino...

Arduino cost = $10 for hardware, and a few hours of amateur coding, and an expectation of a 25 year lifespan as long as no changes are needed.

PLC cost is $15k for the hardware, and $10k to hire an expert to code it, who probably forces you into a $10k/year maintenance contract.

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).

You are also getting high quality components(i.e industrial use) with a PLC.

And what makes you think an amateur can cobble something together in a few hours while a professional cannot?

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 but does it fit the form factor?

For all we know the palm is also sending serial commands?

Let me play the role.

"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.

O Captain! My Captain!

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.

https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~michalj/palmos/Memory.html

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 am not necessarily disagreeing with you.

I had a Z22 toward the end of the Palm era; back when LifeDrive was on their higher end and webOS seemed to be where the future might end up.

I loved that thing. I read tons of books on it.

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