fofo a gogo

@netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org YES IT DID ❤️❤️❤️

Enthusiastically happy caps, if that wasn’t clear :)

I worked on the service component, and also handled all of the service, os, and firmware builds. I sat next to the Bluetooth lead, a close friend, who was working on the port.

I remember clearly him showing me the first build that booting to a shell, and running top.

Prior to that, it was 100% homegrown, and while that was cool, at the time this was the smallest form factor I’d ever seen a UNIX running on. It was amazing.

And that was an amazing team.

@netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org @ltning@pleroma.anduin.net @robey@messydesk.social Could be. I believe we only ever shipped to Europe with DT in Germany, and Telefonica in Spain (I wanna say there was a smaller French presence as well, but memory is failing me). I _think_ even then Europe had relatively reasonable band standardization, so may be possible, if old Nokia GSM handset can connect, that a Hiptop could establish emergency voice CX. Data would be 0% joy though. Complication is that there are multiple levels of authentication and handshake, especially when GPRS comes into play. When one starts a sidekick, and this was true for every model with any type of radio, there was a “dot” sequence one could observe on the connectivity status… stretching my memory, one dot was having a connection to the cell tower, two was establishing a PDP context (or whatever that was called across standards… basically, digital services were allowed), 3 dots was an actual routable TCP connection, followed by “G” which meant connection to the Danger service was established, sessions were synched, spice was flowing). We had to have tight integration with the carriers, as they really didn’t want just anyone using potentially high-traffic network services, and as part of that handshake process, the carriers verified IMSI/MSISDNs with our backend.

@ltning@pleroma.anduin.net @netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org Sadly, in very limited capacity. They will still boot, and later editions_may_ connect to towers on bands and modulations they support. Much of what made them awesome, though, was the tight integration between the cloud and the applications which allowed near-realtime sync of application data, and service-based session proxying which made for effectively always-connected devices at a time when “cloud” wasn’t a thing and connections were spotty. There was even an awesome ssh client and accompanying proxy (thanks to @robey@messydesk.social [I hope you don’t mind the mention, robey!]) which held sockets and sessions on the backend and meant that one didn’t lose their shell sessions when stuck in the Caltrain tunnel. That service doesn’t exist anymore, and being the first of its kind, many of the critical protocols were bespoke and aren’t in use today. But, whatever software exists on a unit that boots, still works. Including the first video game I played that actually had great stereo sound design, a platformer called “Bob”.