From an article I stumbled upon today, detailing the file manager that shipped on virtually every Symbian device in history.
The Files UI should be familiar to anyone that has used a file manager or folder system/explorer on a computer and it behaves the same as well. Pictured to the left is the standard view when you open Files. It shows several “drives”, C:, E: and F: with F: being your memory card if your Symbian device has a memory card (SD, Mini/Micro SD) slot. Pictured to the right, you can see additional drives that are shown when you connect external devices via USB On-The-Go (if your device has USB-OTG) such as flash drives, hard drives or other phones. G: and H: represent the Mass Memory and Memory card on my Nokia N8 that is connected to my 808 PureView via USB OTG… that’s a LOT of GBs to manage!
Back when I used Symbian as my main smartphone operating system (I had an E72), I always found it funny that Symbian used drive letters, while the mobile operating system I used for years and years (Windows Mobile/PocketPC) did not – or at least, not in a user-visible manner. At the time, I assumed that Symbian used drive letters in a virtual way to placate Windows users who were used to them.
In recent years, however, I’ve found out that Symbian’s use of drive letters actually goes back much farther than that. Psion’s EPOC (Symbian’s 16bit predecessor; Symbian was created by Psion) also used drive letters – open up a Series 3 (I have a 3a) and you’ll see that the two disk slots are designated A and B. Going even further back in time, even my Psion Organiser II (1986) used A: and B: for its two disk slots. I don’t have a device to check, but I would assume that the Organiser I also used drive letters.
Interesting how a concept dating back to CP/CMS made it all the way to the most modern Symbian phones.
Thank you for sharing. The article was very interesting. I espcially like how the USB devices were given drive letters. Amazing how in alot of modern devices there are still “throw-backs” to the “good ol’ days” 🙂
using a task manager on symbian, also reveals the use of “exe” extensions on the processes
And .dll for loadable modules.
Worse was the Symbian C++ dialect with its Hungarian notation for method behaviour, two step initialization, handles for pointers, handles for strings …
It’s not a bad thing. Always liked the drive letter monologue, because it saved so much time referencing complex paths.
See the analogy in DCL: You could define logicals to “abbreviate” complex path constructs. It’s not that VMS was particularly easy to use, but… 🙂
Atari ST also used drive letters. A: could be the floppy disk drive, and B: a virtual drive, used when copying from one floppy to another on a computer with only one floppy drive. (The floppy disks had to be taken in and out several times to copy a single floppy.)
Yup, i can confirm this. TOS uses driver letters. A and B for floppy drives. B being a virtual drive when you only have one floppy drive. And the first hard drive would be named C and so on. Just like in DOS – CP/M.
ahhh CP/M how I remember thee, according to wikipedia the list of OS’s that use(d) drive letters (although incomplete) is as follows:
Digital Research CP/M, MP/M, FlexOS, Concurrent CP/M, Concurrent DOS, Multiuser DOS, System Manager, REAL/32, Personal CP/M, DOS Plus, Novell DOS, PalmDOS, OpenDOS, and DR-DOS
86-DOS
IBM PC DOS and Microsoft MS-DOS
MSX-DOS
Elektronika BK operating systems: ANDOS, CSI-DOS, MK-DOS
PTS-DOS
Atari TOS
SpartaDOS X
GEOS[3]
SymbOS
OS/2 / eComStation
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Xbox video game console operating system
FreeDOS
ReactOS
Symbian OS
DexOS[4]
Edited 2014-07-26 11:49 UTC
Sometimes i find the osnews rating system a bit unfortunate. I’d like to vote up you up, but can’t …
EPOC16 was really the predecessor of Symbian in name only, to be nitpicky. EPOC32, which eventually became Symbian, was a complete rewrite with no real ties to EPOC16. EPOC32 was nice, I loved my Psion Series 5mx (though my EPOC16 3a was pretty cool too).
That’s exactly what predecessor implies.
Touché
I guess I’m just used to predecessors, in software, usually having some link, whether that’s reused source code or in their general design. DOS being a predecessor of Win 9x, UNIX being a predecessor of Linux, etc. Even if it’s a perfectly valid use of the word “predecessor”, I suppose it feels a bit odd to think of two mostly unrelated OSes that way.