2009-06-28
Unix In Your Pants
Last week I posted about how all the phones I care about were designed in the United States, rather than Europe, Japan or Korea. They’re also not really phones, but computers. They have one other thing in common- they all run Unix.
This really is shocking if you were around in the 1980s, or even the early ’90s, but the inexorable progress of Moore’s Law - combined with clever stripping of the worst bits of the open source Linux GUI, or the most demanding parts of Mac OS X - means that the Android and Pre platforms share with the iPhone a Unix core.
Of course, unlike the dreams of the ultimately failed OpenMoko initiative, all of these devices are more or less locked down. Sure, you can download source for the first two, but until recently neither offered a native code SDK. (Unsurprisingly Apple’s device is even less open.) Nonetheless, deep in the guts of my phone - and probably yours - is an OS written forty years ago for a minicomputer. What a strange industry.
