
Some of the work we did at Danger - kaptain
https://medium.com/tech-talk/d823af31f7c
======
mcculley
I tried developing for the Sidekick when it came out. I had one and was very
happy with it. The API and the hardware were a delight.

I remember being frustrated that the only means of technical support was a
terrible walled garden web forum. There was no email gateway, so one had to
keep checking that site for answers. I would have much preferred mailing lists
and a public website indexable by search engines.

The bigger frustration was that T-Mobile was the gatekeeper for app
distribution. If you wanted to get an app to a phone, it had to be on the
store, you had to get T-Mobile's blessing, and they had no plans to support
free apps. The carriers were very much still oriented around the ringtone
economy and were terrified that you might put something on your phone without
getting a cut of a fee.

People complain now about Apple and Google and the processes that impede app
distribution, but the iOS and Android ecosystem is way better than what
existed when the carriers were in charge.

I remember thinking that the Danger folks were very responsive and very sharp,
but it didn't matter because they were in the end beholden to T-Mobile and
T-Mobile didn't get it. There's an ecosystem lesson in there for anybody
trying to build a new platform.

------
zurn
I wonder what this means:

> the world owes a debt of thanks to Jeff Bush who was the first person we
> know of to get a full TCP/IP stack working on a cellular data connection

IP is natively supported by GPRS and worked from day 1, and before that
regular GSM-data had been used for TCP/IP for a long time.

~~~
mixmax
From 1999 to 2003 I ran a startup where we had a digital signage solution with
displays placed around Copenhagen that had a built-in OEM GPRS phone module.
They ran a full TCP/IP stack, and were able to update the displays on demand.

If I remember correctly we had it up and running around Q1 2000 which seems to
be before this (Not quite sure though, the article doesn't mention specific
dates)

~~~
danfuzz
IIRC, when we were evaluating GPRS modules for potential use in the hiptop, we
would consistently find ourselves testing modules that worked well for a
minute or two at a time but would fall over flat if you tried to keep a
connection going for any length of time.

If all you needed was a few dozens of seconds of connectivity — such as, I'm
guessing, to update a sign — that was probably just dandy. However, that's not
how the hiptop worked; it generally aimed to open a connection to the
"mothership" soon after boot, and it would hold it open, for hours or even
days, network willing.

------
cwyers
"As an interesting historical side note: the engineers who developed the Java
runtime for hiptop would later join Google and lead the Android kernel
engineering team; and develop Dalvik, the Java language runtime for Android."

I'm pretty sure that's less a historical side-note and more an invitation for
Sun to subpoena you to testify the next time Google says their version of Java
was a clean-room implementation.

~~~
wmf
If the clean room was located in Danger HQ it was still a clean-room
implementation.

~~~
protomyth
Isn't a clean room implementation supposed to be free of people who have seen
the code for the original? I guess I'm a bit confused on this one.

~~~
wmf
I'm not sure of this, but my impression is that Danger's VM was written by
people who didn't look at Sun's source code. And then they didn't look at it
again when they wrote Dalvik.

~~~
protomyth
Oh, that would make more sense. Although, thinking about it, I am still a bit
clueless how Dalvik itself would violate Sun / Oracle's IP unless it had
copied code.

------
lelandriordan
I had the Sidekick/Hiptop 2 back in high school because my mom had T-Mobile
through her work. To this day I have not been stopped by more people asking
about a device (not even the original iPhone I saved up for as a freshman in
college). T-mobile was spotty at best in the DC area so nobody else I knew had
it, everywhere I would go people would say things like "It has a browser!?!"
or "I thought only Treos and Blackberries had email!?!". It was a sad day when
my mom changed companies and we switched to AT&T(aka Cingular). I salute you
Danger, I wish there were more small innovative hardware companies like you
these days.

------
nppc
Nostolgia ... I remember those days.

Developers try so hard these days to implement push notifications from their
apps & services and boast about all the IFTTT stuff.

Carries here in India used to provide email-to-sms as a free service. You
would just send an email to +91PhoneNo@xyzprovider.com and that message would
be sent to PhoneNo as an SMS (160 chars from subject).

Now a days if you want to send a message, you need to have developer accounts,
install Software on the devices to receive the notifications, need to have a
data connection on the phone, talk to push notifications clouds and a few
other things.

~~~
SingAlong
The email-to-SMS trick makes me feel very nostalgic. I still think that was
the most brilliant idea for mobile notifications in those days.

Sometime in 2007, I setup a forwarding rule in my GMail account for my long-
distance friend's address. When she mailed, I would get it as an SMS on phone
and run back home to chat if I was out.

It stopped working after sometime. I'm not sure what happened. I remember
reading it was made an enterprise-only service by some telecom operators. If
they the service back up and running, I'm sure there are many ideas waiting to
be built on top of it.

~~~
bagels
TMobile still has this service, I use it to send messages to the wife if I
forget my phone.

------
zachlipton
The Danger Hiptop was an incredible device. At a time when RIM basically
thought the web was a useless feature on a mobile device, Danger built an
amazing mobile browser (discussed in the article) that wouldn't be matched
until the iPhone. Instead of a handful of limited text-based WAP sites, the
Hiptop rendered full desktop sites and did a pretty darn good job of making
them usable on a mobile device.

I still miss that General Magic bunny though.

~~~
seestheday
RIM didn't think that the web was a useless feature. The crappy browser on old
BlackBerry devices was due to carrier limitations (literally not allowing
blackberry to put a full browser on - refusing the buy devices from any major
OEMs with proper browsers on them). Apple forced AT&T to let them include a
full browser on it.

Pre iPhone and Android carriers really did run the show because they owned the
access to the customer.

T-Mobile was trying to differentiate with the Danger stuff, which is why they
allowed it to run a better browser. AT&T/Cingular and Verizon were big enough
that they wouldn't have allowed it.

------
tlrobinson
Random question: Does anyone remember a (translucent?) device (toy?) that was
about the size of a graphing calculator and had a little antenna sticking out
the side, and you could wirelessly send messages to other people nearby
(within a couple hundred feet probably) with the same device? This was
probably around 2001.

~~~
erik
Are you thinking of the Cybiko?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko)

~~~
tlrobinson
Yup, thanks!

I probably still have one or two in a box in my parents' house somewhere...

------
bonaldi
That web dashboard that combines mail, notes, calendar and to-dos in one
screen is great - I would like that today, and I don't think I can get it.

~~~
mattmanser
Haha, your account looks old enough that you should remember the mid 2000s
when every other startup or website was a dashparts website that looked just
like that?

Personalised homepages? And they all were just a bit broken? iGoogle seemed to
kill them all off.

~~~
pjc50
_iGoogle seemed to kill them all off_

And then was killed off in its turn ...

------
Zigurd
I found out about why deaf people used the Danger Hiptop once when I was
already working on Android software development. I saw a young woman on the T
commuter rail intently typing at almost unbelievable speed on a Hiptop, faster
than I had ever seen anyone use any Blackberry or other device.

I knew about many of the Android team having worked for Danger, but I had
never seen one "in the field." When she stopped for a moment, I asked her
about the device. It was apparent she was deaf, so we used my pocket notebook
to communicate. She told me all her deaf friends had Danger Hiptops.

~~~
eli
Yup, I think T-Mobile even bundled it with a data-and-messaging-only plan (no
minutes) at one point.

~~~
mentat
My brother who is deaf used this to communicate with all this friends and
family. No point in having voice minutes when you can't used them. Integration
with relay services made it the most important device you could have to always
be able to communicate.

------
rospaya
This is a really nice story, but I have to react to all the people swooning
over this - Nokia (Symbian) had a lot of these functions back in the day, but
it was never popular in the US so people often forget about it.

~~~
danfuzz
(I know I'm biased here, but FWIW…)

Nokia's Symbian phones always struck me as trying to be "little big
computers." The hiptop was different; it wasn't trying to be a stripped-down
version of a desktop (or laptop) computer. It really embraced its form factor
whole-heartedly.

Rather than aiming to be (something like) a Nokia Symbian clone, the hiptop
struck me as coming from the same place the original Palm Pilot did, but with
the benefit of several years of industry advancement in terms of its
technology base. E.g., beyond what you saw in the Pilot, we managed to get
into the base system: real internet networking, true preemptive multitasking
(though not address space isolation), and a much "realer" web browser.

~~~
scholia
Symbian started long before mobile phones with Psion's EPOC. It was used in
some very nice little PDAs that had very good keyboards (Psion Series 5), and
later, competed against Microsoft's Windows CE, which also competed with the
Palm PDAs.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPOC_%28operating_system%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPOC_%28operating_system%29)

------
Tiktaalik
I can't help but wonder how much better off Nintendo would be right now if
they had bought Danger when they had the chance to partner with them.

~~~
happycube
And how much better off Danger would've been!

------
rdl
Kind of amazing that Danger's VC partner knew more about cellular networks
than the founders did. I wonder who he was and which firm.

~~~
edwin
Greg Galanos (founder of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrowerks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrowerks))
and his associate Mark B Johnson (Apple alum).

------
msh
I am sad that the keyboards have disappeared from smartphones :(

~~~
rsync
Agreed. My favorite phone form factor is still this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Q](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Q)

Also, I miss pcmcia cards. Just saying.

~~~
GFischer
My favourite form factor is the "tall slider", like the Blackberry Torch or
the one I own, Nokia N86.

But I'll have to give it up and there are virtually no Android devices with a
physical keyboard.

I'll really miss one-handed operation (I could perform all the actions with
only one hand, including typing an SMS), and not having to watch the screen
(touch-typing). But they don't seem to be a necessity for people these days.

------
davb
And if anyone's wondering - the revolutionary audio engine the author mentions
was the Beatnik Audio Engine (BAE), open sourced as the Mini Beatnik Audio
Engine (miniBAE) [1].

[1] [http://www.minibae.org/](http://www.minibae.org/)

~~~
angersock
There's a very interesting quote from that page towards the bottom:

 _" Jim and I believed in the Jeffersonian ideal that a inventor has a lock on
an idea for a limited period of time. There were many ideas in this code that
could have been patented, however we chose not to pursue it. We chose the
Trade Secret route. Because of that, this code did not end up in the hands of
a Patent troll. Now it can be mixed back into the culture, to be recycled and
reinvented."_

------
wilsynet
A few of my friends had a Danger device. My second hand observation (and you
have to remember this was many years ago now) was that they were somewhat
fragile.

One friend was on his 5th hiptop in 18 months, and another was on his 3rd in
about the same amount of time.

If you drop an iPhone on concrete, it survives just fine so long as you don't
shatter the glass. As for a wood floor or carpet, my various iPhones have
survived several falls this way without any issues.

As for Danger, the devices would break frequently, even minor drops would
result in the screen cosmetically undamaged, but something got loose
internally and the device would stop working entirely.

I wanted a Sidekick / hiptop, but the perceived fragility was too much to
overcome.

If anyone reading this worked at Danger, was my perceived fragility of the
phone more anecdotal than real?

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I had one and I don't remember it being necessarily delicate, say broken from
a drop, but a lot of them shipped with engineering flaws, so returns were
normal. I think I had to return mine at least once. Dust would get under the
screen as well, but I learned to live with it.

The forums were full of people complaining. Just normal wear and tear would
break them. Not sure if they ever really resolved the quality issue before
folding. You really felt like a beta tester with the Danger device.

------
decktech
I had a Sidekick B&W in high school, and later a Sidekick Color, and people
would ask me about it every single day. I remember having long AIM
conversations under my desk in class. I later upgraded to a Sidekick 2, which
was nice but had some build quality issues. I must have gone through at least
four of them. To T-Mobile's credit, they were very good at replacing them
quickly. I remember sitting at dinner one night, flipping it open to answer an
IM, and the screen detached and flew across the restaurant. I replied that my
screen flew off and that I would have to respond later :)

------
glabifrons
I resisted buying my own cellphone for a long time as I always worked for
companies that provided them for me. Then got a job where they required me to
provide my own. My first phone purchase was the first generation SideKick
Color, and I loved it! I still have the SideKick II that replaced it (I traded
my original one in on it pre-public-release). I still have the external camera
that plugged into the SK Color's headphone jack too.

The screen was gimmicky, but oh-so-cool... it got everyone's attention, and
allowed me to show people what it could do. Everyone was impressed - until
they asked about ringtones. T-Mobile's laser-focus on hip-hop was a real blow
there... I'm not into it, nor were any of the people I showed the device to.
It really turned people away from it when they realized the target market was
teenagers (even though it was an awesome techie's device).

The terminal program was my favorite part (I was a Unix Systems Architect at
the time) and it got a great deal of (ssh) use.

I loved reading through the various descriptions of the apps being developed
on the developers site (skdr?) and waited so patiently for T-Mobile to give
the green light to so many of them (including a super-simple one, the voice-
note-recorder), which they never did. I tried to get my own developer status
(can't remember the term they used) so I could get a key and load the apps
directly onto my device (via usb), but that was shortly after T-Mobile had
made the process extremely difficult with huge forms to fill out and some
catch-22 requirement that you had to already have a program published to get
the dev kit (or something like that). I read a _lot_ of complaints about that.

The best part of the device was the keyboard. It had the best layout and by
far the best feel (and spacing) of any phone thumb-keyboard I've used since.
Better than the Nokia N800 (NIT, not phone), better than the original Android
G1, even better than the N900. It's the only thumb-keyboard I ever used that I
could type on without looking at the keyboard, and quickly... far more quickly
than anything remotely similar that I've tried.

After they cut the service, I used mine as a dumb-phone for a while until the
microphone finally stopped working. That forced me to finally get a
replacement (my N900).

One thing that's pretty impressive about the SideKick II... mine is _still
running_ (never been rebooted) since before T-mobile cut the service! I've had
it plugged in the entire time for fear that if the battery dies, it will lose
the games and programs I have installed (it acted sort-of as a thin client and
downloaded all apps you had allocated upon powerup).

Pretty darned amazing uptime, considering what it was. :)

------
koonsolo
I used to create games for the HipTop, and was invited to those "Danger
Developer Days". Really nice people to work with.

------
nopakos
Very nice story! Imagine that around the same time, in a parallel universe,
Nokia was making the 9210 and 7650 smartphones with similar capabilities.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9210_Communicator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9210_Communicator)

------
sleepybrett
He didn't mention the coolest bit, which was the crazy fliparound screen. Best
nervous tic screen ever.

------
notlisted
I loved the HipTop. It really was one of the first "smart" phones on the US
market. The article's claim "we all started microblogging/lifestreaming" needs
a little context as it claims credit that I feel belongs to someone else...

While Danger had a very basic implementation running internally (pretty cool,
see [1]), they surely didn't have a clue of the potential/value of
lifestreaming/public status updates.

Neither did I. As an initial beta-tester in May/June of 2002 I too had
developed a HipTop mobile blogging site for private use (CF/SQL/Email, mostly
cat and food shots!) -- demoed it to Om Malik who introduced me to T-Mobile --
but it was really Mike Popovic's HipTopNation [2], the first communal moblog
launched on Oct. 4th 2002 and his Oct. 31 Halloween Photo Scavenger Hunt that
sparked the popularity and showed the potential.

After HipTopNation quickly gained traction [3] with 1000+ mobloggers, Danger
decided to launch a "hiplog" service/site to consumers on Jan 13, 2003 [4].
Joi Ito has a nice timeline [5]

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20041205233554/http://www.spies....](https://web.archive.org/web/20041205233554/http://www.spies.com/~jersey/hiptop-
pics/index.html)

[2]
[http://hiptop.bedope.com/index.php?FILTER=zvxr@gevny.qnatre....](http://hiptop.bedope.com/index.php?FILTER=zvxr@gevny.qnatre.pbz&GIMME_ENTRY=1)

[3]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20050915215559/http://www.guardi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050915215559/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/webwatch/story/0,12455,858719,00.html)

[4] [http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2003/01/13/danger-
announce.html](http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2003/01/13/danger-announce.html)

[5]
[http://archive.today/e4Ie#selection-685.35-685.47](http://archive.today/e4Ie#selection-685.35-685.47)

------
bmalicoat
The best part of the hiptop IMO, was the development community. It was ultra
tight knit and accepting of newbs. I have many fond memories of side loading
apps from skdr.net and eventually reaching the point of uploading my own
creations.

~~~
jgeorge
I miss the Danger developer community every single day. A finer bunch of
people (in general, there were exceptions... :-) I've never known.

------
Atlas
Great read! The cloud services on the Sidekick worked so well that T-Mobile
would routinely tell customers to hard reset the phone when even a minor issue
occurred.

That was all great until a storage area network upgrade failed and destroyed
all data for many customers. When those phones stopped synchronizing, T-Mobile
recommended a hard reset. That meant the data was gone forever.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss)

~~~
Sanddancer
I remember that day with sadness, and still miss my sidekick five years later
because it did so many things right. I was on BART to visit some friends, lost
signal, and did what I normally did when things acted up and reset my
phone...only to come back to having lost all my contacts, my emails,
everything. It was very frustrating to say the least.

------
dasil003
Having spent 3 years from 2008-2011 biking by the Danger building every day on
my way to work in Palo Alto (until one day it unceremoniously changed to
Microsoft), but only being vaguely aware of the Sidekick this was quite
interesting.

------
fjarlq
The main problem I had with my Sidekick was T-mobile's crummy coverage, even
in the middle of silicon valley. I could endure the slow performance, but the
coverage was so spotty in 2004 that I stopped hauling the damn thing around.

~~~
davb
I had the opposite issue. T-Mobile coverage in my city in Scotland was great
at the time (aside: it was also marketed as the T-Mobile Sidekick here, not
the Danger Hiptop).

My real issue was that we missed out on a lot of the value added features that
US customers got. Our app store was pretty sparse, software updates came many
(many) months after US customers, and since so much data was proxied through
Danger in the US we had many additional points of failure.

I vaguely remember griping about not being able to get a direct net connection
during a period of transatlantic network instability. It was a bit like BIS
(Blackberry Internet Service) in this regard.

I also remember the spate of high profile celebrity account hacks at the time.
I think the always-on sync feature really was revolutionary but it did
highlight the risk of sharing everything, all the time, with a service
provider.

That said, the device was really ahead of its time. In the UK, BIS Blackberry
devices were very uncommon. Sure, we had things like the Sony P800 [1] but the
push service, IM functionality and world-class hardware keyboard of the Hiptop
were unparalleled. And it's difficult to underestimate the utility of the RGB
LED and the ability to set the notification color depending on device events.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P800](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P800)

------
jetzz
One more random and offtopic question: there was a tv show centering around
handheld computers like epson hx20s back in 80s. actors are somehow fighting
with bad guys using those devices. Does anyone remember such a show?

------
doxcf434
I've yet to see a mobile SSH client that's as usable as Terminal Monkey.

~~~
jgeorge
I will take to my grave the "true" amount of actual live shipping code that I
have written via Terminal Monkey.

------
bch
Of course it runs NetBSD...

[http://www.hiptop3.com/archives/sidekick-lx-2009-blade-
will-...](http://www.hiptop3.com/archives/sidekick-lx-2009-blade-will-run-
netbsd)

------
yskchu
Some more history on wikipedia:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_(company)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_\(company\))

------
nicholassmith
I always wanted a Hiptop but they never really seemed to show up in the UK.
Great bit of technology history to read over though.

------
fulafel
I never saw these devices. Did they make it to Europe?

------
threeio
Awesome read, thanks.

------
sscalia
I had a Sidekick Color and a Sidekick II. I also carried a Moto RAZR while I
was in high school.

The sidekick was a phenomenal device. Battery lasted all day -- I could text
and had unlimited data over GPRS (maybe EDGE?) - and I was one of the only
students who could Google and read in class. I browsed forums, looked up
answers, even started essays on that keyboard.

You had a persistent AIM -- and the interface was prettier and more fluid than
Android (up to the latest release).

What a delight that device was.

