Journey To The Past (13): Wireless Systems (2001-2002)

Programming mobile phones was a real adventure. The segmented memory model of the 16-bit architecture implied just like the same 8086 / 80286 constraints from ten years before. Despite the restriction on system resources (which made me gain valuable know-how, even for my current work back in the client/server resp. multi-tier world), the development and debugging environments for embedded devices are something that takes getting used to. I was involved in several customer projects, mainly implementing man-machine-interfaces and sometimes even low-level device drivers (e.g. for the Samsung SGH-A500 and Asus J100 phones).



In the old days, common practice was to rewrite whole applications from the scratch for each new phone, depending on the underlying device drivers. We tried to improve that ponderous approach by building a C++ framework for mobile phone applications, which would encapsulate device specifics and provide a feature-rich API.



As one of the senior programmers I was in charge of laying some of the framework's groundwork (GUI, non-preemptive scheduler, API design and similar topics), and I also wrote several tools that completed our developer workbench, e.g. a phone emulation environment for Windows, graphic and font conversion programs, and a language resource editor. I was also managing a Java 2 MicroEdition port project.