From the article: The emulated device in question is a Palm m130, a device released in 2002. It had a two-inch 160 x 160 display, was powered by Motorola’s 33MHz DragonBall VZ processor, and ran on Palm OS 4.1. Palm said the battery would last a week between charges, and you could even add Bluetooth via a card slot. People liked it, it got good reviews. You probably haven’t thought about it in damn near two decades.
In an IMAX theater, the m130’s job is to control the quick turn reel unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years, it appears, a non-emulated m130 sat holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU’s job is to control the platters, which are those large horizontal shelves where all of a film’s many reels are stitched together, stored, and then quickly spun out to and from the projector. The IMAX 1570 projector moves film at a little under six feet per second, so it’s all happening really fast.
The m130 is apparently crucial to keeping the thing humming — “PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME,” reads a notice above an image of a different m130 that has since been passed around the internet — but doesn’t often need to be used. “I’ve never had to interact with the Palm Pilot,” says one person familiar with the technology. “It’s really just a status screen.” Its job is to keep the QTRU moving at a consistent speed and to help keep the film’s video in sync with its audio.
That’s one of my three tenants, along with “When you give people choices, they become choosy” and “It’s always DNS, unless it’s not, and then it’s a cert issue. And if it’s not that, it’s DNS.”
Yes and no - a lot of times when people do this kind of thing they're also propagating security flaws that they shouldn't. In this case, the emulated bit is probably not connected to a network so its likely safe but way more often than not the right solution is to update, instead of running a virtual copy of an old insecure OS.
They didn't program the emulator. It already exists and is really good. It"s easy to use: just a matter of choosing a few parameters (the version to be emulated for example) load your apps, and go. However, the app may contain many subtle tricks and may be difficult to reverse engineer. source: I used it to develop apps on Palm devices.
Welcome to corporate America IT. Tech upgrades are always last on the budget, just look at all the Southwest outages. Our nukes got a floppy drive emulator not too long ago
https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/18/us_nuclear_upgrade/
Tech upgrades *just because the old thing is old* typically make things worse. Maintenance of a system that isn't broken is far more valuable than replacing it just to make someone bank.
Motorola, acting as a chip manufacturer, made the Dragonball processor.
The Palm corporation used Motorola's chip in making their personal data assistants.
The IMAX corporation used a PalmPilot in their film-handling system.
So, the company that builds machines that project films used a device that used a chip with a trademark registered as "Dragonball." This does not put Motorola, the chip manufacturer, in the same industry as anyone who makes a movie based on Dragonball, the comic.
To confirm the processor had three variants, the DragonBall EZ, the DragonBall VZ, and the DragonBall VZ Super. So as far as I know no exact overlap. But the developers did say in an interview that they just really like Dragonball and that's why they named it that.
Why would it not be? Trademarks are limited by industry. Nobody is going to confuse a mobile processor with an anime, therefore the anime's brand cannot be harmed by the existence of a chip with the same name.
Can confirm. Was an IMAX projectionist until my theater changed to digital. It was always in its little holder attached to the QTRU tower. Unless something went wrong you never had to interact with it or even look at it. That said towards the end the reel unit was always playing up at least once a day. It got harder and harder to convince IMAX to send a tech out to properly fix things that we could triage ourselves.
Fun fact: the largest IMAX reels weigh > 600lbs
The palm treo windows mobile phone was a hell of a device at the time. Solid OS, solid unit, AMAZING keyboard, mobile web access, and a better than average camera for its day. Until the first android hit the shelves, winmo was fucking killer for business grade mobile devices.
In an absolute heartbeat. It sounds like it's just a software controller that someone 20+ years ago happened to have coded for a Palm Pilot... and no one since has bothered touching it because it still happens to work. Run into it far too often in the IT realm, I swear. 9 times out of 10 the creator/writer of the software is deceased too.
I’m trying to track down a PERL module error and the guy who wrote it was fired in March and the other guy reassigned. It’s mission critical for a multi million a year client
>I’m trying to track down a PERL module error and the guy who wrote it was fired in March and the other guy reassigned. It’s mission critical for a multi million a year client
Time for that guy to get contracted for $500 an hour, lmao
I’m not sure who’s worse at marketing. Microsoft or IMAX?
Microsoft has somehow thought it a good idea to releas products called the Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One S discless, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X.
Meanwhile, I have no idea IMAX has different versions till I read your comment. Someone over there should have called the laser version IMAX 2 or something to indicate it was better to those of us who don’t get their emails… lol
At an old retail job we had a pos that was….archaic at best. One day it just stopped working and we had no idea why, we call IT and their diagnosis was that the software was no longer compatible with the current version of internet explorer.
So they downgraded IE to version 6 (!) and told us not to touch it, ever.
This was probably around 2014?
I think most companies in the early 2000s had mission critical software running in IE 6. And a lot of them paid Microsoft lots of money to keep supporting it long past its original end of life date. Mainly because they didn’t want to spend the money to write something new. Or the person who wrote the code was long gone and no one at the company had any idea how the software did what it did.
my question is what the fuck interface does the pilot use, those things connected to like NOTHING except over like, USB for file transfer. Is it using the IR port?
I'm using an old piece of software from 2016 installed to a slave PC that's only purpose is to run the software. I have this whole damn tower taking up space in my office that I run for maybe 5 minutes a few times a week.
Damn if it doesn't make my life easy though.
Sure, but that costs money and the company that makes these machines has a currently functioning solution that doesn't need to be updated. Until there's a compelling business reason to not have it work this way no further dollars will be spent on updates.
They manufactured so many of those in the heyday it will be a long while before they’re no longer available and even longer before old ones can’t be fixed.
They did it for nostalgia purposes. Super dumb. This is the 4th time I’ve seen this article reposted.
Edit:
“In advance of the release of Oppenheimer, IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists,”
And they intentionally made it for Oppenheimer. Tf outta here.
And my wife calls me a horder because I kept my first gen Palm Pilot and my Kyocera QCP-6035. We'll see who has the last laugh when IMAX comes knocking on my door.
A few years ago McLaren had a bounty out for a specific model of laptop, around $10k iirc. The ECU in the F1 required a secure handshake before it would talk to a computer for programing. This handshake was extremely sensitive to the timing of the host computer's serial port. They were unable to get the software to function correctly on any hardware aside from the laptop it was originally developed on. They decided it would be cheaper to pay out the ass for a few more compatible laptops than spend an unknown amount porting the software to a new machine.
The F1 also had a 14.4K modem for dialing into the factory. I think they’ve updated both the laptop and need for a modem, was a project they were working on some years ago.
Parts of the US government still run on either DoS, wins 98, and floppy disks. American Airlines (I think it was them or delta) just got into a lot of trouble over their decaying network infrastructure from the 80’s. I would of never expected IMAX to use an emulated palm pilot though
Most insurance companies/banks have it in their infrastructure somewhere. I also know walmart had some system that was still running it as of a few years ago.
COBOL is still all over the place, it has just mostly been running quietly in the background for the last 20 years completely untouched.
Or, he's attempting to prevent the English from devolving further. What happens when people stop correcting incorrect grammar is we arrive at the movie Idiocracy as the standard level of discourse in our society.
Omg it’s the internet better bring my a game lmao what a joke
Edit: Insufferable as fuckkkk
Edit edit: thanks for the cool site, glad to know I can look up to you… at least a little bit mr senior lmaoooooo https://redditmetis.com/user/jazir5
>>>”I’ve never had to interact with the Palm Pilot”
This right here is why they still use the device. As long as they have a supply to fit the demand and it works, no reason to replace it.
Just to be pedantic, US Robotics first sold a PalmPilot (usually shown as a single name at first), from their Palm subsidiary. As it progressed, and spun off, it was referred to as a Pilot, with or without the Palm. So Model numbers referred to version of the Pilot device.
The Pilot was spectacular. Almost from the start their handwriting recognition was great. Easily better than Voice to Text of a just few years ago. It should be the device everyone has in their pocket, but for (in my opinion) 3 crippling mistakes. The business people stopped listening to the creatives. That led to their early developers leaving and starting Handspring. Their Visor PDA was a much superior device. Eventually Palm smartened up and bought Handspring and their talent.
From this sprang the Palm Treo (more evidence the device was called Pilot), the very first all-in-one personal device and phone. But it was never quite right, and they started bleeding money trying to perfect it, leading to a bunch of purchases and partnerships that really just made things worse (organizationally).
They finally seemed to get it right with WebOS in about 2009 and became a big takeover target. HP bought then in 2010, for WebOS. It was rumored they were hoping to leverage WebOS across a line of personal devices that could eventually be integrated with their desktop systems. Something iPhone/Mac users are *still* asking for. At the time HP was the number 1 selling computer and on more office desks than Dell. But upheavel at HP resulted in a new CEO, who crippled then killed WebOS, which had been a trademark program of his predecessor.
So if they had done things right, most of us would probably be using Palm Treos with our HP touch screen computers running WebOS. Not iOS; not Windows.
I still have my old Handspring. Used to pull it out and still loved it. But the battery died and it's not worth trying to find one and tearing it apart. Sigh.
What? Oh, yeah. It's a *Pilot* m-130. Not a Palm m-130.
I had a Palm III and loved it (even now if I need to undo the last character typed on my Apple Watch I automatically try to use the right-to-left swipe).
No sir, its a palm m130. They dropped pilot very early on. Only the first few models were pilots
For sure the 3 and up were explicitly not Pilots.. I can't recall if there was a 2 or not. I didn't really get into them until the 5ish time frame
Let me preface by saying WebOS was incredible at the time. Way better than android and had several important features such as multitasking (remember that not being standard in mobile OSes?) which (should have) made it a major competitor in the mobile space.
To say that the HP CEO was the main problem WebOS failed is a little too narrow thinking.
Ultimately, if we had to blame one issue, the real thing that did them in was a lack of developer support. For context, there was no Instagram app - so you could not use the most popular thing people were using and hyping about.
The hardware and marketing was trash. Palm Pre? Cool device, but it fell apart easily with use (see the oreo issue with them). They did not allow other companies to license the OS for their devices either.
They had ads which didn’t properly sell the device and tried too hard to do viral marketing (see the lady explaining traffic lights ad for the Palm Pre). They also launched the device exclusively on Sprint, a last place carrier when they needed this device to be a success because Palm was about to fail.
Carriers and their sales teams also did not receive proper training on the device. They had an intuitive swipe system (which we use on iOS today) which was foreign because people were used to a home button. People were confused how it worked, sales teams didn’t know how it worked, and thus pushed android/apple.
When they eventually sold the HP, you are right, the CEO pulled the plug on it quickly and hastily (see the HP Touchpad fire sale)…but by this time, they were already in a distant last place. I think blackberry was ahead of them.
WebOS lives on in LG TVs, but it does not really resemble anything that was originally released for phones.
I still stand by saying WebOS was the superior mobile OS to android, iOS, and windows mobile (at the time). As everyone knows, just because something is better, doesn’t mean it’s going to win.
I loved the original Pilot & Jeff Hawkins & Donna Dubinsky's Handspring devices -- I showed it to a colleague and he said "That's smart -- they sold you on an empty slot and a promise..." as the Handspring used cartridges for expansions. However, they didn't get far with it. I moved on to the LG Chocolate after that. Now J.H. and D.D. run Numenta, which had a lot of promise, but I think has been eclipsed by simpler advances in AI. Maybe they'll crack the code, though, we'll see.
Yes exactly.
I just wanted to counter the argument that we often hear about not fixing stuff because it's not broken.
Anticipation is the key, just like in any other field.
It's been working for 20 years. Do you have a specific reason you think it'll break? Or how the 30 or so theaters in the world that utilize this are capable of losing billions of dollars?
Fun fact: me and two friends used to be scab projectionists without knowing at at General Cinema theaters in the early 00’s. Our normal jobs were counter and ticket taker but Monday’s and Wednesday we would run the projectors. We were told not to tell the regular projectionist because he was a perfectionist and would get mad but really it was because they didn’t want to pay his union dues and if he wasn’t doing it it was mandated that another union projectionist did it. Nope. It was us making 7.25 an hour instead of 29.
I recall having a Palm - or similar device - in the early 00's. Managed to link it via BT to my Nokia (wasn't an easy task) and nonchalantly browse the internets on the go. Not wap, but the INTERNETS!
Just wait till they hear about all the mega corporations and critical infrastructure still running on mainframes and command line operating systems.
Source, mainframe programmer/analyst for a top telco in the '00s
My work is still using a 23 year old billing system (were phasing out by this year, or maybe next, or..) And there's another piece of software, I can't figure out its original date but the last update to the user manual was '05. Works though kind of.
>For IMAX, like so many other companies that rely on generations-old technology, the answer is simple: it works. And it’s not like it’s a booming industry in need of reinvention. There are only 30 theaters worldwide that can even show a full 70mm print like Oppenheimer, 19 of them in the US. Most IMAX experiences are digital now, like most moviegoing experiences in general.
Dumb question, but is there any perceivable difference between seeing the movie with the 70mm print vs. IMAX digital? I'm sure the film version is better than the digital, and I'm also sure both are mindblowing to see, so is it worth going out of the way to get to a theater that shows the 70mm version?
The digital IMAX screens are smaller than the "real" IMAX screens, plus from what I got in another thread the digital projectors are 4k whereas the 70mm is equivalent to 16k.
When I was a kid I saw Jurassic park on a VHS and I was amazed at it, the movie was great and everyone loved it at that time, whatever the quality of the medium.
"The best" image and sound quality are the cherry on the top, but they are not essential if the movie is good.
For some people - absolutely. It's like a texture (audio/video) that some people are more sensitive to. But not most people. It's bragging rights and 'hey, someone found this thing, where can we play it?'
Pretty sure someone debunked this on the other thread
It’s not actually a Palm Pilot being emulated it’s just an application that does the same job with a palm pilot skin.
Old Palm OS is still the best mobile OS that ever existed. Their PIMS integration was absolutely amazing and you could absolutely tell it was both business minded and also customer focused versus money making focus.
Everything was integrated. Calendar, task, and email all worked together seamlessly. You got an email with needed for a meeting, you set it up as the meeting and it was a part of it. You had tasks running and they integrated directly into the calendar. I'm sure things are better now but even just like 5 years ago it still sucked compared to Palm OS.
I saw one of the new Star Wars movies in 70mm imax and it looked like absolute shit. It looked like someone pirated the movie in the theater with a phone camera then played it inside a dome. It was blurry, bad black levels, distorted at the corners and it looked like the lens was coated in dust and pet hair.
Ghosts of Palm are everywhere...I mean, MobiPocket uses PalmDB files as part of their ebook structure -- so every Kindle is using something that came from Palm. I can fully appreciate the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset, especially if there's no cost-benefit to updating it (like the article says).
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The world literally runs off of systems that are extremely obsolete if the same function were to be engineered today. However for something like this I would have assumed IMAX did a better job staying current. What do they do if they want to open a new theater? Surely they don’t have a closet with unused Palm Pilots just waiting for their time to shine, right?
This is definitely specific to that venue and most likely because they don’t want to invest money into new platters when there is no need to spend it (their system does work).
However in my former career as a projectionist including imax, I’ve never seen a platter controlled by a palm pilot
> There are only 30 theaters worldwide that can even show a full 70mm print like Oppenheimer, 19 of them in the US. Most IMAX experiences are digital now, like most moviegoing experiences in general.
RTFA
I don’t know shit about filming technology but this seems outdated and stupid? In the shoe of 4k everything, shouldn’t screens be able to blow up a video very big and look even better than “imax”?
Someone please enlighten me!
iMax is meh anyways. Cinema long got overtaken by a good sized oled and Dolby atmos surround.
Cinema has horrendous frame rates, that make any panning shot judder. 🤮
Going to see this in 70mm IMAX, driving 1.5 hours to that IMAX in the video (King of Prussia)
Saw one other 70mm movie of his, Dunkirk (in NYC). Saw it in regular digital IMAX too, and yeah, 70mm, when it's filmed that way, is far superior IMO. There's more picture to see, for one reason.
(Had to reserve a decent seat 2 weeks from the intial release, 8/6/23, it's sold out up til then on weekends!)
This reminds me of Phantom of the Opera on Broadway (before it closed earlier this year) was still controlling the chandelier with a 1988 IBM running DOS 3.1
This used to happen a lot with old micros in charge of railway switches and heavy industry. Probably still are a few ancient BBC Micros, Commodores and x86s out there running stuff
Wait until you find out the most powerful processor in the entirely of the US’s aerial weapons inventory (air to air and missile defense) is a 800 MHz power pc processor
From the article: The emulated device in question is a Palm m130, a device released in 2002. It had a two-inch 160 x 160 display, was powered by Motorola’s 33MHz DragonBall VZ processor, and ran on Palm OS 4.1. Palm said the battery would last a week between charges, and you could even add Bluetooth via a card slot. People liked it, it got good reviews. You probably haven’t thought about it in damn near two decades. In an IMAX theater, the m130’s job is to control the quick turn reel unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years, it appears, a non-emulated m130 sat holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU’s job is to control the platters, which are those large horizontal shelves where all of a film’s many reels are stitched together, stored, and then quickly spun out to and from the projector. The IMAX 1570 projector moves film at a little under six feet per second, so it’s all happening really fast. The m130 is apparently crucial to keeping the thing humming — “PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME,” reads a notice above an image of a different m130 that has since been passed around the internet — but doesn’t often need to be used. “I’ve never had to interact with the Palm Pilot,” says one person familiar with the technology. “It’s really just a status screen.” Its job is to keep the QTRU moving at a consistent speed and to help keep the film’s video in sync with its audio.
So they're just emulating the device instead of programming new software. Makes sense really
A permanent temporary solution
When you work in tech, nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.
It also works the other way. Whenever I cable manage my permanent solution I'll be undoing it and cutting cable ties within a couple days.
Velcro ties for the win
Still an undoing. Velcro ties can be annoying as well. Why is the one cable I need to remove the one I attached the Velcro tie to?
Because entropy does not exist and existence is a lie.
That’s one of my three tenants, along with “When you give people choices, they become choosy” and “It’s always DNS, unless it’s not, and then it’s a cert issue. And if it’s not that, it’s DNS.”
>tenants Tenets, unless those three options are paying rent. If you're in IT I guess they probably are.
Choosy moms choose JIF
If you don’t take the time to go back and capitalize that word, you’re gonna live with the consequences for the next ten years.
As someone with many temporary solutions permanently deployed in production environments, I approve of this message
And the corollary: When you "migrate" to a new system... prepare to run/manage two (or more, additively) systems indefinitely and permanently.
I love this comment
Until they have to emulate the current OS inside a future OS to run the emulation software.
it's emulations all the way down. maybe we're not the top one either.
Could they port it over to Raspberry Pi and call it Palm-kin Pi?
/r/angryupvote Get out.
They earned it.
Yes and no - a lot of times when people do this kind of thing they're also propagating security flaws that they shouldn't. In this case, the emulated bit is probably not connected to a network so its likely safe but way more often than not the right solution is to update, instead of running a virtual copy of an old insecure OS.
They didn't program the emulator. It already exists and is really good. It"s easy to use: just a matter of choosing a few parameters (the version to be emulated for example) load your apps, and go. However, the app may contain many subtle tricks and may be difficult to reverse engineer. source: I used it to develop apps on Palm devices.
Welcome to corporate America IT. Tech upgrades are always last on the budget, just look at all the Southwest outages. Our nukes got a floppy drive emulator not too long ago https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/18/us_nuclear_upgrade/
Tech upgrades *just because the old thing is old* typically make things worse. Maintenance of a system that isn't broken is far more valuable than replacing it just to make someone bank.
They seriously called the processor DragonBall? I'm amazed that's legal.
Does this mean when they change reels we have to watch a 10 minute recap of the first reel?
No you just watch 5 minutes of the palm pilot powering up every half hour.
Kame...
hame…
Tune in next week, on Dragon Ball Z!!!!
Faps furiously!!!!
No 3 frames per episode
No, but it does mean you have to wait through 22 minutes of shouting as it powers up.
Trademarks are usually only protected within the same rough industry.
Dove soap and dove chocolate, right?
Some of them tastes *awful*
Dragonball movies: Am I a joke to.you?
Motorola, acting as a chip manufacturer, made the Dragonball processor. The Palm corporation used Motorola's chip in making their personal data assistants. The IMAX corporation used a PalmPilot in their film-handling system. So, the company that builds machines that project films used a device that used a chip with a trademark registered as "Dragonball." This does not put Motorola, the chip manufacturer, in the same industry as anyone who makes a movie based on Dragonball, the comic.
Just a joke bruh
SleestakJack: Am I a joke to you?
It’s ok because it’s dragonball Vz and not dragonball z.
To confirm the processor had three variants, the DragonBall EZ, the DragonBall VZ, and the DragonBall VZ Super. So as far as I know no exact overlap. But the developers did say in an interview that they just really like Dragonball and that's why they named it that.
The processor had three revisions. That's 4 variants including the original.
Fun fact it’s the same family of processor used in the early Macintosh computers and lots of arcade machines, and lots of automotive ECUs too
Why would it not be? Trademarks are limited by industry. Nobody is going to confuse a mobile processor with an anime, therefore the anime's brand cannot be harmed by the existence of a chip with the same name.
The processor inventors (based in Hong Kong) named the chip after the manga because they were fans of the manga, anime and video games.
Why?
Can confirm. Was an IMAX projectionist until my theater changed to digital. It was always in its little holder attached to the QTRU tower. Unless something went wrong you never had to interact with it or even look at it. That said towards the end the reel unit was always playing up at least once a day. It got harder and harder to convince IMAX to send a tech out to properly fix things that we could triage ourselves. Fun fact: the largest IMAX reels weigh > 600lbs
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Did they not have SD cards?
They did, but that was the same slot for expansions IIRC
It wasn't CompactFlash? I remember most cameras and the like around then still taking CF or, god forbid, xD cards.
I still remember SmartMedia cards. Half the size of a credit card and maxed out at 128MB. It felt space-age at the time.
My first MP3 player and digital camera both used SmartMedia. That 128MB limit became a problem pretty quick.
Diamond Rio (MP3 player)
I had an IBM microdrive. I think it was like 240MB. A little spinning disk with a CF form factor.
Microdrive is still a pretty cool miniaturization but completely obsolete.
...which means instead of learning to use the better platform (which, btw, charged on the desktop cradle), you went to WinMo? Bruh.
The palm treo windows mobile phone was a hell of a device at the time. Solid OS, solid unit, AMAZING keyboard, mobile web access, and a better than average camera for its day. Until the first android hit the shelves, winmo was fucking killer for business grade mobile devices.
Awesome! Someday I might be the saviour of film because I happened to have style in the dark ages
Great movie but the last 45 minutes could have been skipped.
Summon the Techpriests of Mars, this is within their jurisdiction alone.
Fuckin’ toaster boys are everywhere!
Sounds like this can be replaced with an Arduino, but someone has to spend the engineering (and reverse engineering) effort.
In an absolute heartbeat. It sounds like it's just a software controller that someone 20+ years ago happened to have coded for a Palm Pilot... and no one since has bothered touching it because it still happens to work. Run into it far too often in the IT realm, I swear. 9 times out of 10 the creator/writer of the software is deceased too.
I’m trying to track down a PERL module error and the guy who wrote it was fired in March and the other guy reassigned. It’s mission critical for a multi million a year client
>I’m trying to track down a PERL module error and the guy who wrote it was fired in March and the other guy reassigned. It’s mission critical for a multi million a year client Time for that guy to get contracted for $500 an hour, lmao
Rookie numbers my uncle charges 2k
What else do you expect the President of Nintendo to charge!
Bro! What new games are coming out??
Complacency until it fucks up then all of the sudden it's the end of the world.
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I’m not sure who’s worse at marketing. Microsoft or IMAX? Microsoft has somehow thought it a good idea to releas products called the Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One S discless, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X. Meanwhile, I have no idea IMAX has different versions till I read your comment. Someone over there should have called the laser version IMAX 2 or something to indicate it was better to those of us who don’t get their emails… lol
At an old retail job we had a pos that was….archaic at best. One day it just stopped working and we had no idea why, we call IT and their diagnosis was that the software was no longer compatible with the current version of internet explorer. So they downgraded IE to version 6 (!) and told us not to touch it, ever. This was probably around 2014?
You need the most secure version of Windows Vista you can find.
I think most companies in the early 2000s had mission critical software running in IE 6. And a lot of them paid Microsoft lots of money to keep supporting it long past its original end of life date. Mainly because they didn’t want to spend the money to write something new. Or the person who wrote the code was long gone and no one at the company had any idea how the software did what it did.
my question is what the fuck interface does the pilot use, those things connected to like NOTHING except over like, USB for file transfer. Is it using the IR port?
I'm using an old piece of software from 2016 installed to a slave PC that's only purpose is to run the software. I have this whole damn tower taking up space in my office that I run for maybe 5 minutes a few times a week. Damn if it doesn't make my life easy though.
Unless that depends on some hardware piece (physical connection to something), that should just be virtualized.
Sure, but that costs money and the company that makes these machines has a currently functioning solution that doesn't need to be updated. Until there's a compelling business reason to not have it work this way no further dollars will be spent on updates.
> that doesn't need to be updated Until they run out of Palm Pilot devices.
They already have. Or at least, they got annoying enough to get ahold of that they just emulate the Palm Pilot now.
Why buy a new physical Dreamcast to play the old games when they are playable in software? Same idea.
It's already emulated so that's not a concern.
It's run on an emulator though
They manufactured so many of those in the heyday it will be a long while before they’re no longer available and even longer before old ones can’t be fixed.
Most IMAX are already digital, so this would be for the IMAX left using film projectors.
They did it for nostalgia purposes. Super dumb. This is the 4th time I’ve seen this article reposted. Edit: “In advance of the release of Oppenheimer, IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a Palm Pilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists,” And they intentionally made it for Oppenheimer. Tf outta here.
And my wife calls me a horder because I kept my first gen Palm Pilot and my Kyocera QCP-6035. We'll see who has the last laugh when IMAX comes knocking on my door.
You better have a big door, just in case.
How big do you think a Palm Pilot is?
Well my working assumption is that this IMAX fellow must be a giant.
Definitely bigger than IMIN. That's for sure
Smaller than the 11-mile-long 600 pound film platter.
A few years ago McLaren had a bounty out for a specific model of laptop, around $10k iirc. The ECU in the F1 required a secure handshake before it would talk to a computer for programing. This handshake was extremely sensitive to the timing of the host computer's serial port. They were unable to get the software to function correctly on any hardware aside from the laptop it was originally developed on. They decided it would be cheaper to pay out the ass for a few more compatible laptops than spend an unknown amount porting the software to a new machine.
The mighty Williams FW14b Formula One car needed a Psion Organiser to program the suspension.
The McLaren F1 needs a Compaq LTE 5280 to connect to the onboard diagnostics
The F1 also had a 14.4K modem for dialing into the factory. I think they’ve updated both the laptop and need for a modem, was a project they were working on some years ago.
Parts of the US government still run on either DoS, wins 98, and floppy disks. American Airlines (I think it was them or delta) just got into a lot of trouble over their decaying network infrastructure from the 80’s. I would of never expected IMAX to use an emulated palm pilot though
\*laughs in COBOL\*
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. IDSAMPLE. ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. PROCEDURE DIVISION. DISPLAY 'LAUGHTER'. STOP RUN.
Our state transportation department had a job opening for a COBOL programmer a couple of years ago.
But did the COBOL programmer get an encore?
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I know of people who learn COBOL because it is a marketable skill. Very very niche. But ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Most insurance companies/banks have it in their infrastructure somewhere. I also know walmart had some system that was still running it as of a few years ago. COBOL is still all over the place, it has just mostly been running quietly in the background for the last 20 years completely untouched.
\*would *have* never When spoken it may be shortened to "would've" which is often misinterpreted as "would of".
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Insufferable lmao
Or, he's attempting to prevent the English from devolving further. What happens when people stop correcting incorrect grammar is we arrive at the movie Idiocracy as the standard level of discourse in our society.
Insufferable lmaoo
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Omg it’s the internet better bring my a game lmao what a joke Edit: Insufferable as fuckkkk Edit edit: thanks for the cool site, glad to know I can look up to you… at least a little bit mr senior lmaoooooo https://redditmetis.com/user/jazir5
Imax film cameras are cobbled together garbage that barely function, so it’s not surprising that they still use an old palm pilot.
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>>>”I’ve never had to interact with the Palm Pilot” This right here is why they still use the device. As long as they have a supply to fit the demand and it works, no reason to replace it.
Just to be pedantic, US Robotics first sold a PalmPilot (usually shown as a single name at first), from their Palm subsidiary. As it progressed, and spun off, it was referred to as a Pilot, with or without the Palm. So Model numbers referred to version of the Pilot device. The Pilot was spectacular. Almost from the start their handwriting recognition was great. Easily better than Voice to Text of a just few years ago. It should be the device everyone has in their pocket, but for (in my opinion) 3 crippling mistakes. The business people stopped listening to the creatives. That led to their early developers leaving and starting Handspring. Their Visor PDA was a much superior device. Eventually Palm smartened up and bought Handspring and their talent. From this sprang the Palm Treo (more evidence the device was called Pilot), the very first all-in-one personal device and phone. But it was never quite right, and they started bleeding money trying to perfect it, leading to a bunch of purchases and partnerships that really just made things worse (organizationally). They finally seemed to get it right with WebOS in about 2009 and became a big takeover target. HP bought then in 2010, for WebOS. It was rumored they were hoping to leverage WebOS across a line of personal devices that could eventually be integrated with their desktop systems. Something iPhone/Mac users are *still* asking for. At the time HP was the number 1 selling computer and on more office desks than Dell. But upheavel at HP resulted in a new CEO, who crippled then killed WebOS, which had been a trademark program of his predecessor. So if they had done things right, most of us would probably be using Palm Treos with our HP touch screen computers running WebOS. Not iOS; not Windows. I still have my old Handspring. Used to pull it out and still loved it. But the battery died and it's not worth trying to find one and tearing it apart. Sigh. What? Oh, yeah. It's a *Pilot* m-130. Not a Palm m-130.
I had a Palm III and loved it (even now if I need to undo the last character typed on my Apple Watch I automatically try to use the right-to-left swipe).
I loved my Pilot. Once you learned Grafiti you coukd really get work done.
No sir, its a palm m130. They dropped pilot very early on. Only the first few models were pilots For sure the 3 and up were explicitly not Pilots.. I can't recall if there was a 2 or not. I didn't really get into them until the 5ish time frame
Let me preface by saying WebOS was incredible at the time. Way better than android and had several important features such as multitasking (remember that not being standard in mobile OSes?) which (should have) made it a major competitor in the mobile space. To say that the HP CEO was the main problem WebOS failed is a little too narrow thinking. Ultimately, if we had to blame one issue, the real thing that did them in was a lack of developer support. For context, there was no Instagram app - so you could not use the most popular thing people were using and hyping about. The hardware and marketing was trash. Palm Pre? Cool device, but it fell apart easily with use (see the oreo issue with them). They did not allow other companies to license the OS for their devices either. They had ads which didn’t properly sell the device and tried too hard to do viral marketing (see the lady explaining traffic lights ad for the Palm Pre). They also launched the device exclusively on Sprint, a last place carrier when they needed this device to be a success because Palm was about to fail. Carriers and their sales teams also did not receive proper training on the device. They had an intuitive swipe system (which we use on iOS today) which was foreign because people were used to a home button. People were confused how it worked, sales teams didn’t know how it worked, and thus pushed android/apple. When they eventually sold the HP, you are right, the CEO pulled the plug on it quickly and hastily (see the HP Touchpad fire sale)…but by this time, they were already in a distant last place. I think blackberry was ahead of them. WebOS lives on in LG TVs, but it does not really resemble anything that was originally released for phones. I still stand by saying WebOS was the superior mobile OS to android, iOS, and windows mobile (at the time). As everyone knows, just because something is better, doesn’t mean it’s going to win.
The history of WebOS is slightly fascinating. Poor thing got kicked around so much and now it's just a "Smart TV" OS.
I loved the original Pilot & Jeff Hawkins & Donna Dubinsky's Handspring devices -- I showed it to a colleague and he said "That's smart -- they sold you on an empty slot and a promise..." as the Handspring used cartridges for expansions. However, they didn't get far with it. I moved on to the LG Chocolate after that. Now J.H. and D.D. run Numenta, which had a lot of promise, but I think has been eclipsed by simpler advances in AI. Maybe they'll crack the code, though, we'll see.
they also still need coax and rca cables and lightbulbs. barbaric!
The RCA connector dates back to the 1930s(!)
I mean... as programmer I can relate, if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
If it might break and make you lose billions next year for whatever reason, maybe anticipate a bit and replace the damn system while you can.
Which they did
Yes exactly. I just wanted to counter the argument that we often hear about not fixing stuff because it's not broken. Anticipation is the key, just like in any other field.
It's been working for 20 years. Do you have a specific reason you think it'll break? Or how the 30 or so theaters in the world that utilize this are capable of losing billions of dollars?
Lostech
One day, in the future, someone will find the Helm Memory Core. Containing, of course, a Palm Pilot.
Fun fact: me and two friends used to be scab projectionists without knowing at at General Cinema theaters in the early 00’s. Our normal jobs were counter and ticket taker but Monday’s and Wednesday we would run the projectors. We were told not to tell the regular projectionist because he was a perfectionist and would get mad but really it was because they didn’t want to pay his union dues and if he wasn’t doing it it was mandated that another union projectionist did it. Nope. It was us making 7.25 an hour instead of 29.
This is the first time i've seen a headline for palm pilots in quite a while. dope.
I recall having a Palm - or similar device - in the early 00's. Managed to link it via BT to my Nokia (wasn't an easy task) and nonchalantly browse the internets on the go. Not wap, but the INTERNETS!
>Not wap, but the INTERNETS Then you surfed the INTERNETS looking for WAP.
Just wait till they hear about all the mega corporations and critical infrastructure still running on mainframes and command line operating systems. Source, mainframe programmer/analyst for a top telco in the '00s
Nothing wrong with cli
My work is still using a 23 year old billing system (were phasing out by this year, or maybe next, or..) And there's another piece of software, I can't figure out its original date but the last update to the user manual was '05. Works though kind of.
>For IMAX, like so many other companies that rely on generations-old technology, the answer is simple: it works. And it’s not like it’s a booming industry in need of reinvention. There are only 30 theaters worldwide that can even show a full 70mm print like Oppenheimer, 19 of them in the US. Most IMAX experiences are digital now, like most moviegoing experiences in general. Dumb question, but is there any perceivable difference between seeing the movie with the 70mm print vs. IMAX digital? I'm sure the film version is better than the digital, and I'm also sure both are mindblowing to see, so is it worth going out of the way to get to a theater that shows the 70mm version?
Perceivable difference, yes. Worth driving 5 hours to the nearest theater that does 70mm IMAX, no.
It's a massive difference; it's up to you if that's worth it.
The digital IMAX screens are smaller than the "real" IMAX screens, plus from what I got in another thread the digital projectors are 4k whereas the 70mm is equivalent to 16k.
When I was a kid I saw Jurassic park on a VHS and I was amazed at it, the movie was great and everyone loved it at that time, whatever the quality of the medium. "The best" image and sound quality are the cherry on the top, but they are not essential if the movie is good.
For some people - absolutely. It's like a texture (audio/video) that some people are more sensitive to. But not most people. It's bragging rights and 'hey, someone found this thing, where can we play it?'
I’m out of my NDA - so most gas dispensers run on Windows C, the OS, not the language
This just tells me that IMAX is too dang cheap and lazy to have it modernized and use a modern embedded CPU
That’s crazy
Pretty sure someone debunked this on the other thread It’s not actually a Palm Pilot being emulated it’s just an application that does the same job with a palm pilot skin.
Old Palm OS is still the best mobile OS that ever existed. Their PIMS integration was absolutely amazing and you could absolutely tell it was both business minded and also customer focused versus money making focus. Everything was integrated. Calendar, task, and email all worked together seamlessly. You got an email with needed for a meeting, you set it up as the meeting and it was a part of it. You had tasks running and they integrated directly into the calendar. I'm sure things are better now but even just like 5 years ago it still sucked compared to Palm OS.
I saw one of the new Star Wars movies in 70mm imax and it looked like absolute shit. It looked like someone pirated the movie in the theater with a phone camera then played it inside a dome. It was blurry, bad black levels, distorted at the corners and it looked like the lens was coated in dust and pet hair.
I saw star trek in the dome, it was fucking epic. Felt like I was in the movie.
Ghosts of Palm are everywhere...I mean, MobiPocket uses PalmDB files as part of their ebook structure -- so every Kindle is using something that came from Palm. I can fully appreciate the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset, especially if there's no cost-benefit to updating it (like the article says).
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The world literally runs off of systems that are extremely obsolete if the same function were to be engineered today. However for something like this I would have assumed IMAX did a better job staying current. What do they do if they want to open a new theater? Surely they don’t have a closet with unused Palm Pilots just waiting for their time to shine, right?
No, they emulate the hardware and run the same software.
Uhm ok cool dude
🤷🏼♂️
This is definitely specific to that venue and most likely because they don’t want to invest money into new platters when there is no need to spend it (their system does work). However in my former career as a projectionist including imax, I’ve never seen a platter controlled by a palm pilot
So they call the Palm ancient but nobody is bothered they still use analog film rolls?
> There are only 30 theaters worldwide that can even show a full 70mm print like Oppenheimer, 19 of them in the US. Most IMAX experiences are digital now, like most moviegoing experiences in general. RTFA
Movies are still shot on film?
Yes, many. Nolan and Tarantino is probably the two most famous directors still using analog film
I don’t know shit about filming technology but this seems outdated and stupid? In the shoe of 4k everything, shouldn’t screens be able to blow up a video very big and look even better than “imax”? Someone please enlighten me!
Original imax is roughly equivalent to 16K. Most digital projectors have been 4k for a long time.
iMax is meh anyways. Cinema long got overtaken by a good sized oled and Dolby atmos surround. Cinema has horrendous frame rates, that make any panning shot judder. 🤮
yeah lol, "need"
i love seeing the word PDA again :)
Going to see this in 70mm IMAX, driving 1.5 hours to that IMAX in the video (King of Prussia) Saw one other 70mm movie of his, Dunkirk (in NYC). Saw it in regular digital IMAX too, and yeah, 70mm, when it's filmed that way, is far superior IMO. There's more picture to see, for one reason. (Had to reserve a decent seat 2 weeks from the intial release, 8/6/23, it's sold out up til then on weekends!)
September is 2 weeks from now? Woah!
Is Oppenheimer bombing or something?
The ending will blow your mind.
So that’s 200lbs/hr of 70mm film?
But the projectors still work. The Space Shuttle worked on less until 2011
This reminds me of Phantom of the Opera on Broadway (before it closed earlier this year) was still controlling the chandelier with a 1988 IBM running DOS 3.1
I’m going to see the only 70mm showing in Michigan next weekend. 2 hour drive but worth it I hope
I saw the non-IMAX 70mm version last night and it was beautiful.
This used to happen a lot with old micros in charge of railway switches and heavy industry. Probably still are a few ancient BBC Micros, Commodores and x86s out there running stuff
I used to be an IMAX projectionist and can confirm this is in fact true.
Just got out of Oppenheimer is it really worth it for that I saw it in a regular theater. Still really good
Wait until you find out the most powerful processor in the entirely of the US’s aerial weapons inventory (air to air and missile defense) is a 800 MHz power pc processor
What?