Local Area Mobile Computing on Stock Hardware and Mostly Stock Software

In the Fall of 1992, the graduate Operating Systems class at Carnegie Mellon University implemented the necessary components to provide applications with a programmable interface to a mobile palmtop computer. The goal of the project was to expose project members to the area of mobile computing through "shock immersion.'' Over the course of two months, students designed and implemented the infrastructure for a simple mobile computing environment for low-end palmtop machines. This programming environment was used to develop a suite of mobile applications such as a mailer, graphical locator map, the game tetris, and a scheme interpreter that allowed functions to be remotely executed on the palmtop. In this paper, we describe the results of the course project and the lessons learned.