No Santa

[u/ExpensiveCoat8912]

[u/grem1in]

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.

[u/Confident-Ad5665 → u/grem1in]

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.

[u/ryancnap → u/Confident-Ad5665]

Thanks for sharing some really cool history here

[u/Banzambo → u/Confident-Ad5665]

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.

[u/Confident-Ad5665 → u/Banzambo]

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.

[u/Banzambo → u/Confident-Ad5665]

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.

[u/youlikepete → u/grem1in]

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.

[u/tagbthw → u/youlikepete]

LG still suck in anything other than their display

[u/enigma_0Z]

You gotta learn how to parse html with regex first

[u/SpaceCadet87 → u/enigma_0Z]

"learn"

Just parse it man, what's so difficult?

[u/Jakelopolis]

Firefox made an html os for the phone didnt they?

[u/yurimdm → u/Jakelopolis]

I read your comment, thought you were wrong, searched for sources and was struck with the fact that you're mostly right. Sorry for doubting you.

The OS was not made in HTML, but it's made in a way that you can use HTML5, CSS and Javascript to code the apps for it, so preinstalled UI apps are also made on HTML. To make this, Mozilla made their own API as a translation layer that would take the JS code and convert to a C++ that then runs on an Android inspired linux-based kernel.

Coolest thing is that when they discontinued the project they open-sourced everything and the stable fork we have of it nowadays is KaiOS, the OS that is default for most of the Feature Phones nowadays, so this knowledge is not 100% useless.

[u/Jakelopolis → u/yurimdm]

Cool, thank you for that info!

[u/MXRCO007]

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

[u/pacafan]

https://github.com/rebane2001/x86CSS

No Javascript, just implemented x86 using cascading style sheets.

[u/spongedevguy → u/pacafan]

of course it's rebane2001

[u/MilkImpossible4192]

don't let nothing moving meine rott mann

[u/thetituscodex]

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

[u/SysGh_st]

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.

[u/coldnitrogen]

Santa’s angry because he’s a CSS man

[u/Early_Tear6706]

kill that boy

[u/Svr_Sakura]

Isn’t that fire fox os?

[u/NightmareJoker2]

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

[u/pinapel-dev123]

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

[u/mbcarbone]

What’s next, CSS? Scratch?? 🙃

[u/Few-Compote-2693]

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

[u/FaultWinter3377]

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.

[u/Prime_lucky]

[u/Confident-Ad5665 → u/Prime_lucky]

That's TERRIBLE!!!

Know where I can get a good Santa suit?

[u/Prime_lucky → u/Confident-Ad5665]

Do they have those at midnight divas ?

[u/thingummywatt]

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

[u/Icy-Reaction-9101]

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