Symbian for Software Leaders: Principles of Successful Smartphone Development Projects

Chapter 15. Design goals for Symbian OS

The birth of EPOC32

The first internal release of E32 took place in the software department at Psion on 10th December 1994. The release notes for this release state simply:

Version 0.01.001
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(Made by Colly, 10 Dec 1994)
1) First release.

This contained the results of several months of prodigious labor by Colly Myers (who, three and a half years later, was to become Symbian's first CEO). E32 is the lowest level of what we now call Symbian OS, but which was at the time known as EPOC32 (see the annotated glossary of abbreviations, in the appendix, for some more details).

Although many months of activity had preceded the first release of E32, it was only a tiny fraction of the work that was to follow. Driven by the needs of an ever-larger team of software developers who were creating higher-level software components, new internal releases of E32 came thick and fast. Version 0.01.002 was released on 13 December, 0.01.003 on 14 December, and so on. There were no fewer than nine releases before the end of the year. 42 more releases followed at a somewhat more leisurely pace throughout 1995. 1996 saw another 31 internal releases of E32, and 28 more followed, up to release 1.01.110 made on 5th June 1997 – the release that was included in the ROM of the first shipping Psion Series 5 PDA. The release notes for E32 alone over this period fill nearly 10,000 lines of text, and credit more than 30 different people with providing ...