History - Psion, EPOC
We continue our series of reviews presenting mobile operating systems, just as we have promised. After the first review I try to concentrate even more on the history part. Let’s begin, shall we?
Series 60, contrary to common belief, is not a strand-alone operating system, but a user interface for the system called Symbian OS, which has a history that goes back a long time. Its predecessor was EPOC, developed by Psion, a British company, and it’s rumored that the name stands for Electronic Piece of Cheese. British Psion has been established in 1980 and it had strong relations with Sinclair Research, which might be known mostly because of ZX Spectrum. In the beginning they were writing software for Spectrum and ZX81, which have appeared under the brand Sinclair. In 1983 they have been charged with developing an office software pack for the Sinclair QL computer. They made this successfully – they have had the bases for years –, and then they’ve released their first hardware in 1984, this has been the Psion Organiser, which is known as the first portable computer on Earth. It had an 8 bit Hitachi 6301 CPU, 4 KB of ROM and 2 KB RAM, while its display was a one-line, monochrome LCD. In 1986 the successor Organiser II arrived, that had more memory and pre-installed software. What’s more important from our point of view is its single-tasking operating system, for which even end-users could have developed software in OPL (Organiser Programming Language), which has been very similar to the then highly popular BASIC. The decline of the company’s machines has started in 1997, as Series 5 handsets had a hard time competing with cheaper Windows CE-based devices and the Palm Pilot.
Psion Organiser II
After this small detour, let’s get back to EPOC. The first version of the system, EPOC16, was in use at the end of the 80’s/the beginning of the 90’s in 16-bit SIBO machines. The 32 bit EPOC came in 1997, the new system was launched in the 5 series; the list of machines running EPOC32 includes Series 5mx, Revo and Reco plus. The system was written in C++, and it has been under development for years before its launch. It was a single user multitasking system, that ran on ARM processors, had a graphical user interface, called EIKON. As an interesting fact this environment was much more like the ones used on the PCs of the era, rather like the one on concurrent palmtops. EPOC has been first licensed from Psion by Geofox, but they have only manufactured 1000 devices based on it. Breakthrough came with Ericsson, who launched Psion Series 5mx under their own name (this became Ericsson MC218), and they have also releases an EPOC Release 5.1-based smartphone, the R380. It might sound unbelievable, but practically this is the ancestor of Symbian-based smartphones, or rather the first Symbian-based phone. Meanwhile Oregon Scientific has also launched an entry-level handheld computer based on EPOC, this has been Osaris, which had the specialty of being the only one that used Release 4.
Oregon Scientific Osaris, the only handhled computer to use EPOC Release 4
The change came in 1998, when Psion Computers, Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson established London-based Symbian Ltd, and at the same time Symbian Operation System has been born, which has been practically the 6th version of the EPOC system. In 1999 Matsushita (Panasonic) has joined the company, while in 2002 Siemens and Sony Ericsson have followed. Currently 47.9% of the company is owned by Nokia, Ericsson has 15.6%, Sony Ericsson 13.1%, Panasonic 10.5, Siemens AG 8.4, while Samsung owns 4.5%. It’s interesting that although BenQ has bought the mobile department of Siemens, the Symbian shares are still owned by them.
Ericsson R380, based on EPOC Release 5.1
Psion wasn’t closed down after the establishment of Symbian, but the rate of developments slew down. There has been two years of wait before the extended Series 5 has appeared; the color edition was ready in 2001. Meanwhile many of their projects became a failure, and those that have been launched were far from being successful – even though they were experimenting with lots of interesting stuff, like a voice recognition software for PDAs. The company sold their PDA factory in 1999, due to this they had to sack 250 employees from the total of 1200. Handheld computers were used only by very few people in the golden era of Psion, but in the 21st century more and more companies want a slice from this cake, and unfortunately the company couldn’t keep up with the pace. The final hit was the halting of the project they had in common with Motorola. This happened in 2001, when the American manufacturer withdrew from development, which had it costs about 11 million British pounds by then. Psion was looking for a while for a partner to continue the PDA-phone project, but this had no success. At the same time they have united their modem, computer and InfoMedia units under the name Psion Digital Solutions. After halting the production of PDAs, they had incredible losses, in 2003 Motorola, on of the founders of Symbian, sold its shares to Psion and Nokia, and a year later Psion has also stepped out from the business, selling its shares to the Finnish giant. The company currently has only one working division, Psion Teklogix.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
