I got to play with that original Android demo; it's floating around Google and I even wrote an internal Google doc tour of what I found before I left. For those that work at Alphabet you may find it interesting to search that out. The demo itself is basically a bunch of JavaScript.
Fun fact: The original, original demo (pre-acquisition) was Lua based. Andy was skeptical that enough people would know what Lua was so I shifted it over to Javascript. So for a while we were Javascript + 2d render engine. Smells a bit like WebOS or Flutter (though much less fancy in that early sketch).
Shifting from Lua to JS is not trivial! What JS engine did you use?
And can you tell us a bit more about the choice of Java to create apps? Wasn't it frustrating for all the C++ coders in your team to use such a "slow" language for apps?
At the time (very very early) there was only a small amount of code and small amount of native bindings, so it only took a couple days to rebuild the lower layers and I recall Chris got the "framework" running again in js pretty quickly after that was done. I think maybe we used spidermonkey? It's been 15+ years... somebody at Google with access to the fadden demo should be able to figure it out quickly enough.
As for Java, it worked well enough for Hiptop at Danger on a 24MHz ARM7TDMI platform. We felt we could use a similar approach (use Java more for "business logic" and do the heavy lifting in native libraries and services) to get sufficient performance on the 200MHz+ ARM9 platforms we were looking at, and take advantage of having a real MMU for process protection and eventually supporting native code (the latter, more contentious).
Everyone basically did Lua back in that era since it was so damn small. I had it running on 400kb of memory on the PSP, used it for multiple UI frameworks around that era on mobile hardware.
Someone still hasn't built an equivalent to LuaJIT. Quickjs is in the same spirit but still interpreted, the way LuaJIT does C FFI is just pure awesome[1].
I'm seeing more of this in HN where folks hint at something that's available only if you're an employee at one of the tech giants. I feel like it used to be gauche and isn't now. (No jab at you specifically tdeck, just a trend I'm not fond of.)
Sorry about that. I love computer history and put a lot of work into documenting the demo and want people to be able to learn about it, but it's very unfortunate that people outside Google (including me) can't see it. Basically it was a collection of screenshots and some notes on the code / commit log iirc.
It's overwhelmingly a Google thing in my experience, because they're used to everyone else being part of their own insular club (and ignoring the rest of the plebeians incapable of getting a job there).
It's because more than 100,000 people work at Google. If I had written a comment saying "if you're ever in [small city], you might want to check out [thing]" I suspect nobody would have a problem with that.
They definitely think they're innately superior to people like me. If anything I'm underplaying it.
When you're given everything from peer bonuses to spot bonuses to first class flights to Hawaii to unlimited external validation from everyone else - it's not surprising.
Judging by your username and comment history, you seem to think getting into Google is some sort of intelligence test that only a select few can ever pass: it’s not. You just prepare for it and do well as you’d do for any other exam. Getting into Google doesn’t mean you’re inherently smarter than everyone else.
This feels like a cope. I don't think it's true at all. I've studied for years and I haven't gotten into any Google-tier companies. It's all IQ, and people like me aren't chosen to be part of the elite class.
How is that cope? Is it not more cope to just give up and assume you can't ever get in? I honestly believe that almost anyone could do this given the right direction–feel free to reach out (email's in my profile) if you are legitimately interested in trying.
Xoogler is a term. How many other companies have a term like that? They even have a website internally for people who leave and they call them “alums”. Nobody thinks I’m impressive or worthy of respect because of where I work, but people like OP continue to promote an elitist view of the world.
> people like OP continue to promote an elitist view of the world.
Please explain specifically how I've done that if you've going to throw around accusations.
You seem to be reading a lot into the fact that I worked at Google in the past, but I didn't design the hiring process, the data access rules, the cultural vocabulary, or any of the other things you seem aggrieved by. People at giant companies don't have influence over those things, and if you go through my comment history you'll see that I have mixed feelings about working there.
If the mere mention that someone worked at a particular company gives you a feeling of inadequacy, I can certainly sympathize. But you need to realize that those feelings are coming from your own issues and not something I wrote in my comment. It's not necessary or sufficient to work at Google to have a fulfilling career, it's only necessary in this case since the codebase I reviewed is not public.
> It's not necessary or sufficient to work at Google to have a fulfilling career, it's only necessary in this case since the codebase I reviewed is not public.
Ya'll clearly think people like me aren't worthy of being "in the know" (and probably of living at all to be honest) for describing this particular doc. Openly flaunting your immense privilege is usually considered gauche, for the record.
> Ya'll clearly think people like me aren't worthy of being "in the know" (and probably of living at all to be honest)
If this is your read on the situation, you have problems. First of all "y'all" is multiple different people on a website who don't know each other. You can't cite a comment by one person to support your claim that another person believes something, and "that's clearly the subtext" isn't clear to me from any comment in this thread.
For the benefit of other readers, I'll just state it explicitly: this doc describes a TAR file that was shared with me when I worked at Google, that includes source code owned by the company that was never released. That's why the doc isn't public, it's not because I decided you "weren't worthy of being in the know" or of "living at all" - that interpretation is completely ridiculous. There are docs I've written at my current job that aren't public either, and that's not because I believe my colleagues constitute some kind of master race.
The key takeaways for me were:
- The UI looked like an old fashioned flip phone, as in the screenshot from that article
- Everything was JS, as discussed elsewhere
- The functionality wasn't particularly impressive to me, it had a half-finished calendar, contacts app, etc... And some graphical 2D demos
What was most interesting was just poking around the screenshots and commit log which I obviously don't have.
Isn't it weird to name it "ORIGINAL android demo" since that implies that the author new that in the future there would be other android demo.
It'd be like asking a solider in 1915 what war they were fighting and they respond "WW1" (as if they new in advance that there would be a second world-war 30 years later).
Since I wrote most of this doc in early 2020, it takes a look at the demo from a modern point of view.
In fact, when I was using the demo it felt like the color flip phone I used to have around the mid 2000s, and in retrospect it's hard to tell why Android became what it did today. There wasn't much unique "smartphone" functionality in that demo from today's perspective, although I didn't see the original materials about how it was positioned.
