Memories: The early days of Symbian

The deal between Nokia and Microsoft is all over the news these days: Nokia abandoning its own smartphone OS and switching to a Microsoft OS instead? This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. And it brought back memories ...

Back in the late 1990s, I was working for a small software company that specialised in software for electronic organizers and the upcoming PDA market. Those were the days when the Palm Pilot was king. We made both software for synchronization (Windows only) and software that ran on these things - what you would call an "app" today.

Shortly after I started there, a couple of us were put on a top secret project: Nokia and Psion were working together on a new version of Nokia's "Communicator" smartphone line. The company was chosen as a subcontractor since we also made software and apps for both the Psion Series 3 and Series 5 PDAs as well as the Nokia Communicator 9000 and 9110 models.

Anyone remember the Communicator 9000 aka "The Brick"? It was given this nickname due to its size (this was before "to brick" meant ruining a device by a faulty software update). Its successor, the 9110, was a much more elegant design, hardware-wise. Both, however, were actually running DOS with a heavily customized version of GEOS on top. If you had to reboot those devices (which happened frequently), you could briefly see the familiar DOS greeting and prompt flash up. So it was perfectly understandable that Nokia was looking for a new OS.

The plan was to make a new phone using Psion's EPOC operating system, as used in their Series 5 PDAs. And so we worked in secret (and I mean that - Nokia was almost anal about the secrecy of the project) for a while. Then one day, the announcement of Symbian, i.e. the joint venture of Nokia, Psion, Ericsson, and Motorola, completely caught us by surprise. So that's what we've been working on all the time!

The project chugged on but soon a certain disparity became apparent. Those working from the ground up (coming from the hardware and the lower OS levels) and those working from the top down (apps and GUI) somehow weren't on course to meet in the middle. Back in those days, the GUI designers at Nokia pretty much had veto rights. So if something wasn't working the way the GUI designers thought it should work, it had to be changed. And their ideas didn't always align with the event-driven model of EPOC, err, Symbian. So we ended up making a lot of changes to everything and were pretty much on course to create a special Nokia fork of the OS. Someone eventually realized that the project was running off course and halted development. For almost six months, nothing really happened while Nokia and its partners tried to figure out how to get around these issues. The end result was the definition of the various form factors that Symbian would support. The Communicator, with its four hardware buttons to the right of the screen, became one such form factor.

When the project was eventually restarted, I had already moved on to another project. By the time that what came to be known as the Communicator 9210 shipped, there probably wasn't a single line of the code that I had written left in the device. I still remember the first hardware prototype we were given (after working on emulators all the time): A huge piece of plexiglass, with the components of the phone mounted on to it, wired up with ribbon cables. It actually consisted mostly of hardware parts taken from the 9100 and 9110 - nobody outside of Nokia was to see any real hardware or even the casing prior to launch!

And all these attributes that I've come to associate with Nokia - attention to detail, pride of craftmanship, confidence in creating good products - just got buried. Now Nokia is just another hardware maker for Microsoft. RIP the Nokia I once knew.