Re:PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS
by wmf on Sunday April 07, 2024 @06:35PM
(#39964562)
Palm was started by ex-Apple people and borrowed a lot of ideas and mistakes from the Mac.
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Re:PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS
by lproven on Monday April 08, 2024 @06:37AM
(#39968298)
More saliently than that, Palm started out as a vendor of Newton apps, before it started making its own Newton-killer hardware.
Palm's Graffiti started out as an alternate text input system for the Newton. It was an Apple software vendor long before it was an Apple rival, and its design is influenced by the Newton more proximally than the Mac.
Well - it is even more than that. They basically used Apple style code resources to define PalmOS apps. You used to be able to compile Think Pascal code on a Mac, and some guy has worked out how to use that code resource to convert it in to a PalmOS app with just tweaking the code resources in the compiled MacOS code. It was quite mind bending to me as a 20-something PalmOS fanboy with a day job doing Delphi. This was in like, 1998/1999 or so. I even went as far as emulating MacOS just to play with it. I don;t know if his code still exists online, but the tool was called SARC (Swiss Army Resource Compiler) is anyone cares to search for it.
I don't think Palm did a lot to change the exe format in the early days. And they used the same CodeWarrior 68K compiler that also targeted MacOS at the time.