Hacker News Reader

Nokia went through a phase in around 2006 of seriously believing the future was people liveblogging and serving it over 3G from Symbian based Series 60 devices. This was based on "Apache Raccoon" https://sourceforge.net/projects/raccoon/files/raccoon/PS_1_... which was a port of Apache to Symbian, and a port of Python for scripting, complete with the ability to write multithreaded code (GIL excepted) using Symbian Active Objects.

View on HN

I so wanna know more about this, I'll be spending a chunk of the afternoon reading on this story.

The future used to be so cool. Having access to Wikipedia and live reporting always on hand was going to make everyone so informed, easier communications were going to make democracy and grassroots organizing flourish... We were all going to have our own server on our pockets...

We were naive, but I sorely miss the tech-optimism that to some extent carried me through uni.

A further example of how stunningly naive this was: they wanted (external NMEA) GPS connected to it (and Bluetooth beacons when indoors, which had to be created for the project) so people could publish their real time location.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com