That was not the fault of the OS though, but rather embedded dev in general. Techview (the emulator) allowed you to test your code to a point, but because x86 CPUs were more forgiving than ARM ones you still had to test your code on ARM reference boards (H2 and H4). There were only a handful of Lauterbachs floating around since they were so expensive. Only one team got to see the actual phones being developed, and that part of the building was off-limits to everyone else.

We went through several IDEs, Visual Studio, CodeWarrior and finally Carbide.

I’m not saying the OS itself wasn’t complicated though.