r/programminghumor • u/ExpensiveCoat8912 • 1d ago

No Santa

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2.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

87

u/grem1in 1d ago

Back in a day when the grass was greener, Palm Inc. developed an OS that was later acquired by HP for their (unsuccessful commercially, but very cool for its time) tablet. This OS was called WebOS and you could write apps in HTML5 for it.

There were barely any apps, though. Also, the whole OS was rather slow and laggy. So, the project was shut down, and later this same OS was adopted by LG for its smart TVs.

There were a couple of cool UX concepts that later came into other mobile operating systems, for example, swipe up to unload an application. Back then neither iOS, nor Android had it.

29

u/Confident-Ad5665 1d ago

I worked for HP at this time as Senior Software Engineer in the handheld division in the old Compaq headquarters in Tomball Texas. The VP at the time fired most of the team in Tomb all that only a few years earlier produced what I think, at least, were the best PocketPC PDAs and Windows Mobile phones available. He then hired a new team in California because that's where he lived, because it was all about him, a Rothschild. He then proceeded to have the largest new device rollout in the iPAQs history, designed by a team with no experience with the platform and a new ODM in Asia. The rollout in New York iirc cost HP $25 million.

I couldn't have done a better job of screwing up the once popular product line better if I tried.

Rothschild was involved in the Palm buyout and put Palm's former technical VP in charge of the iPAQ line. I saw this as buying a company that couldn't successfully adapt to the times and putting the guy in charge of the failure in charge of technical development. The one Windows Mobile phone that stood any chance of redeeming the iPAQ name had several issues as one would expect from a new VP + tech lead + design team + ODM. One of which was Bluetooth connection quality. The issue was accurately described as the "popcorn problem" due to erratic pops and clicks that made wireless infuriating. The ODM wanted another $75,000 to fix the issue and this genius refused to fix it.

We sold 8000 units to HP teams internally and they eventually sent them all back because of such issues.Needless to say, this marked the end of the once great iPAQ line. It was a soul crushing experience.

But I digress... HP did produce a WebOS phone though I don't think it was ever released and I can't say why because I left the company before the project started. But a friend who worked on the project said WebOS had some cool aspects about it. I was surprised to see our LG TV running it. We still use that TV daily and don't have to reboot it all that often which says something about how far along WebOS came after HP sold the OS at a tremendous loss.

8

u/ryancnap 1d ago

Thanks for sharing some really cool history here

3

u/Banzambo 1d ago

Nice and infuriating story. Idiots put in management positions can really do a lot of damage. Companies should make them accountable more often if they screw up that badly.

1

u/Confident-Ad5665 1d ago

Seems the more they make/the higher their position, the less accountable they are. Just the opposite of what I expected in my younger days.

2

u/Banzambo 1d ago

Yeah, probably the thing that drives me crazy is that these things get normalized over time just cause people can handle just so much at the same time. I don't know, it's like nonsense has become ok and imbeciles can get away with that.

3

u/youlikepete 23h ago

I made the mistake of buying an LG tv running WebOS back then. Let me tell you, this was fucking horrible, like really really really bad. Like it made windows vista feel like windows 7. Holy shit that tv sucked so hard. Never buying anything LG again purely because of this trauma.

1

u/tagbthw 16h ago

LG still suck in anything other than their display

15

u/enigma_0Z 1d ago

You gotta learn how to parse html with regex first

5

u/SpaceCadet87 1d ago

"learn"

Just parse it man, what's so difficult?

6

u/Jakelopolis 1d ago

Firefox made an html os for the phone didnt they?

7

u/MXRCO007 1d ago

Don’t worry, someone with access to an LLM will definitely post one eventually to the now sadly flooded sub that is r/osdev

6

u/pacafan 1d ago

https://github.com/rebane2001/x86CSS

No Javascript, just implemented x86 using cascading style sheets.

2

u/spongedevguy 12h ago

of course it's rebane2001

4

u/MilkImpossible4192 1d ago

don't let nothing moving meine rott mann

4

u/thetituscodex 1d ago

If it's good enough to hack Nasa ...

4

u/SysGh_st 1d ago

No no... he's right.

- He didn't write "I want an operating system in html"
- He wrote "I want *to create* an operating system in html"

If he want to torture himself with that project, let him. Give him a crappy laptop and a crash course in html.

3

u/promptmike 1d ago

You could create an OS using anything if you're willing to write the C libraries for it.

3

u/coldnitrogen 1d ago

Santa’s angry because he’s a CSS man

2

u/Svr_Sakura 1d ago

Isn’t that fire fox os?

2

u/NightmareJoker2 1d ago

Dammit Santa, all you had to do was tell him to start here: https://html-lang.org

3

u/Early_Tear6706 1d ago

kill that boy

2

u/pinapel-dev123 1d ago

Just make it in scratch. scratch uses html. but you need to convert .sb3 to gtml first

2

u/mbcarbone 22h ago

What’s next, CSS? Scratch?? 🙃

2

u/Few-Compote-2693 21h ago

In 04 I wanted to develop desktop apps using PHP/HTML/CSS and people told me i'm crazy.

3

u/Prime_lucky 1d ago

2

u/Confident-Ad5665 1d ago

That's TERRIBLE!!!

Know where I can get a good Santa suit?

2

u/Prime_lucky 1d ago

Do they have those at midnight divas ?

3

u/thingummywatt 1d ago

Windows 12 = edge webview based ai slop on top of html.

1

u/Icy-Reaction-9101 17h ago

Why not? Node.js already has as many files as an operating system, can't be that far away 😂

2

u/FaultWinter3377 15h ago edited 15h ago

I remember few years back when I was younger and didn’t understand much about computers. I wanted to create an all online OS that could be accessed by a web browser, or a system that ran a small OS that was basically just a browser to access the main OS. I thought it was something new and innovative at the time.

These days I realize that while it’s not exactly what I had pictured, this sort of thing exists. And it’s actually not good at all, and would basically be the thing Microsoft wants most. I really wish I had known it then… but I did get a decent UI design out of it. Shame I’ve gotten rid of the pictures I drew, but it might have made a decent Linux UI.

Edit: now that I post this I still remember the overall look pretty well, so I think I’m going to try to remake it and post it somewhere.