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Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

It's an SMP-capable, real-time capable, native Arm OS in C++, which supports a choice of GUIs, keyboard/touchscreen or pure touch UIs, had its own GUI programming language OPL and had a rich ecosystem of 3rd party apps. It's got native networking, Bluetooth, and IRDA support.

It is more complete and more useful than Serenity OS, Redox OS, Genode OS, AtheOS/Syllable, SkyOS, or HelenOS. It's arguably much less capable but more functional than Plan 9 or Inferno.

If this is not of imaginable use then 2020s IT is 100% screwed.

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> If this is not of imaginable use then 2020s IT is 100% screwed

I second that. To put it differently: Have we lost the ability to detect and appreciate (and utilize) the immense value (and excellence, and quality) in technology such as this?

I'd find that concerning ...

PS. I mean, from a different, practical angle: It is begging for some enterprising soul to come up with some compatible, modern (perhaps "simple"/calm-computing/e-Ink based) hardware for it.-

This OS was absolutely top-of-industry, running in millions of devices for decades, reliably, and back when hardware constraints really were a thing, but a thing the limitations of which brought the best in people ...

And how useful is all that in practical real world use cases compared to Android or Linux, considering the pool of Andrid and Linux devs vs the pool of Symbian devs, and also the tooling quality and maturity?

Look into the Neo900 project. A lot of the current "secure" cell phone projects are really US-State plugs. The US Gov't is surprisingly transparent in it's funding. Just not opaque since it's kind of like a holographic sieve. Signal is one example of a Gov't backed and maintained project. Other things out there like LimeSDR recieve funding but maintain more autonomy.

Some people here want to talk to scholars, researchers, journalists, and/or friends/family in foreign countries about surveillance capitalism. Sometimes people want to speak to people who would otherwise be victims of reprisal if their state or their states' allies used the various tools Israel + US sells to hack + de-anonymize targeted individuals(i.e. students, journalists, lawyers, human rights wokers, etc#).

Sure but where doe Symbian fit into all that?

I gave you 5 numbered answers to why Symbian could still be useful today.

I don't have any take on this neo-N900 thing. I'd never even heard of it before.

I had not heard of this before.

I found this:

https://neo900.org/

It says:

« This is a read-only archive of the Neo900 page provided for historical purposes and operated independently. The project is not operational anymore. »

> And how useful is all that in practical real world use cases compared to Android or Linux

There are several possible answers.

1. It's something like 1% of the size and originally ran on systems with circa 4MB of RAM, booting and executing from ROM. There is a lot of value in code that is small enough to study and understand. Modern Linux is incomprehensibly vast and complex:

https://micronews.debian.org/2023/1686455026.html

1.3 billion lines of code. No human can live long enough to read and understand that.

2. Diversity is good. Monocultures are bad, because they are extremely prone to exploitation and attack. Find an attack that gets at a system at a low level and everthing based on that system is vulnerable.

Combine this fact with OSes of vast size, in non-memory-safe languages such as C, and the result is a multi-billion-dollar industry of constant security fixes and the need for high-bandwidth connections simply to download the constant stream of updates.

3. This is not some academic unfinished plaything. It's a former industry-standard OS that shipped on millions of consumer devices and had an entire ecosystem of apps and tools. IMHO that makes it more valuable than, say, Genode or something.

4. This may just be me but if rich modern tools are themselves of vast size and complexity, then that makes them inherently of lower quality compared to smaller simpler tools that can do the same job.

VS Code is built in Electron:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vscode/comments/mwsejl/why_vscode_i...

Electron is built on Chrome:

https://www.electronjs.org/

Chromium itself is incomprehensibly vast, nearing 35 million lines of code in over 40 different languages:

https://openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_summa...

Never mind what it can do -- I think you simply can't trust something that big.

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