Android gets a toybox

I'm sad I can't find the article I wrote for linuxandmain.com back around 2002 on exactly this issue. (I was arguing that the next logical step beyond laptops was hooking a palmtop (newton/ipaq/palm) up to cell tower modems, the reply was that the ergonomics made it impossible for that to ever grow beyond a tiny power user niche. Alas the site went down years ago and archive.org's copy is swiss cheese. The iPhone was announced about 4 years later; presumably it was already in development when I wrote that article)

Here's a project that put a linux dev environment chroot on an android phone a year or two back:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=champion.gn...

That's the current baseline of sad ui that we have to improve upon. (And of course the above can't come preinstalled because it's full of GPL stuff Android has an official policy about not shipping. And I'd prefer a version that didn't cause my phone to reboot if I left it running more than an hour.)

> For programmers, the mainframe->mini->desktop transition
> came with improved interfaces (punch card -> keyboard ->
> keyboard+mouse, teletype -> vt200->cga->vga->modern monitors).

Minicomputers didn't start with improved UI, the first one to take off was the Altair which had toggle switches and LEDs as its input and output. The old PBS computer history documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" starts describing the altair at 18 minutes 30 seconds into here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tsBAS91lTI

It goes on to describe the first thing an Altair ever actually _did_, which was use a series of timed loops to generate radio interference, so you could put an AM radio on top of it and it would play a song.

Intel's 8008 processor was designd to go in a "glass tty", I.E. a video display terminal hooked up to a minicomputer via serial port. The 8080 in the Altair was a sequel to the 8008. (The Intel section of http://landley.net/history/mirror/ starts with interviews with all four of the principals in the 4004->8008->8080 (and z80).)

From the Altair, we went to various ROM Basic systems hooked up to _televisions_ (max possible horizontal resolution about 340 pixels due to the NTSC signal, see http://landley.net/history/scans/icpug-1986-jul/page290-2... so with 8 pixel characters you have 42 columns max), and only years later managed DOS and CP/M (single-tasking, booted from a floppy, not a step up from a PDP-11 with a vt100). The PC _grew_ better UI as it went along, but it started out with monochrome video (then EGA graphics, four colors! One of which was Cyan!)

Meanwhile, Ken Thompson wrote unix on a PDP-7 that he _originally_ started using because it had a vector graphics terminal hooked up to it, so he ported an early version of lunar lander to it. (I don't believe unix used the graphics terminal, but the vector graphics terminal is why he started poking at that mothballed machine.) The reason it was mothballed and abandoned it was a cheap low-end system, nothing special.

The first 3D card (SGI's first product) was an add-on board for a VAX that powered a display terminal. (The Iris 1000: http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Silicon_Graphics#First_gener...)

So by the time the PC grew 3D cards (ala Voodoo and such) circa 1995, minicomputers already had that for a decade (and tron was rendered on minicomptuers in 1982).

The convenience of the PC was you didn't need to sign up for a timeslot on the terminal down the hall when you could have your own dedicated system on your desk. Now you don't need the computer on your desk when you have a comptuter in your pocket.

Oh, the founder of DEC (Ken Olsen) was proud that the PDP-1 had a built-in video display terminal in the operator's console. That's the machine spacewar" was written for. Here's an interview with the Ken Olsen where he talks about that: http://landley.net/history/mirror/interviews/olsen.html

And the wikipedia article about spacewar (in 1961, 14 years before the Altair shipped):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar_(video_game)

> Phones are a huge step back,

The advantage the phone has is that there are billions of them deployed today and people carry them around 24/7. We don't have to make it a better programming environment than big iron, we just have to make it _possible_ to program on them. Having a device should be sufficient to program the device, and not in a second class "you can write BASIC programs but to make real programs like the one it comes with you need a real computer which this isn't".

Hobbyists developers learn to program on the machines they have. I'm not trying to put phones in people's hands, that's _today_. I'm trying to make those phones fully programmable without being second-class citizens dependent on external big iron. (And these days, a PC is big iron. Already happened, past tense. That was what the http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0 talk was about.)

> and if you are going to hook them up to external keyboards
> and displays, you lose most of the benefits of a phone.

The USB keyboard/mouse/monitor allows old farts like you and me to switch over from our big iron VAXes to the new micro-er computers. I doubt your average 12 year old will find an onscreen keyboard "too small and cramped" if that's what they grew up with, and the UI should naturally evolve in response to what people are doing with it.

We are the unix greybeards singing "all the world's a vax" and squinting at those strange kids with their 16 bit PCs going "what a silly toy". Except computer history's a hobby of mine, and this is the fourth generation of this particular transition. I don't have to know how the problems will be fixed to know they will, I'm just trying to steer the future towards android and away from iOS because one is a multivendor commodity system with a theoretically modular software architecture, and the other is a hermetically sealed and locked down system produced by a monopoly that sells the hardware too.

> I'm happy to be proved wrong.

I'm operating on the assumption that there are already 10x as many smartphones in the world as PCs, that people already carry them around 24/7, and that historically economies of scale have always strongly favored the system with the higher unit volume.

Given that smartphones exist, they should be fully natively programmable. If you're going to write code for a phone, you should be able to do it on the phone.

Rob