Pixo

» see pixo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Paul Mercer was writing software at Apple when he left in 1994 to build the thing Apple would need seven years later. Pixo made a system software toolkit in C++ for handheld devices, sold to companies that had to put an interface on something much smaller than a computer. By 2001 the platform had reached version 2.1 and shipped as an application framework with an interface builder on top of it.

That year Apple hired Pixo back. The job was to adapt the company's system software for a music player, and the first-generation iPod ran on it. Apple never announced the arrangement. The only trace of it on the product was the About iPod screen, which listed Pixo among the credits, and a staff biography on the Connectix website describing one of its own engineers as lead architect on the Pixo OS used in the Apple iPod.

Apple bought the Pixo OS outright soon after the iPod shipped, and a firmware update took the name off the About screen. By April 2007 Steve Jobs was on stage announcing the hundred millionth iPod, which makes a toolkit from a company almost nobody had heard of one of the most widely deployed embedded operating systems ever written. A piece of software that shipped a hundred million times went out with its author's name already scheduled for deletion.

~ the record ~

~ the credit that was removed ~

The firmware update is the detail that lasts. A line on an About screen is the smallest acknowledgment a product can make, and it was still more than the finished object was allowed to carry. Nobody at Apple explained the edit and nobody had to. Buying the code outright also removed any licensing relationship that would otherwise have had to be renewed for the life of the product.

The lineage ran a long way past the company. Pixo's work sat in the iPods that did not run iOS, and that line ended with the Classic in 2014 and the Nano in 2017. Somewhere in that stretch is the last device sold anywhere with a descendant of a 1994 startup's handheld toolkit inside it, and nothing printed on the box said as much.

~ what sun actually bought ~

By the time Sun Microsystems completed the purchase on 17 July 2003, Pixo was no longer in the handheld operating system business at all. The press release describes a privately held San Jose company whose product managed "the secure distribution and monetization of digital content for mobile subscribers", which is rights management for ringtones and Java games. Brian O'Shaughnessy, Bell Mobility's vice president of wireless technology, is quoted saying that its new Application Download Service was based on Pixo's technology and that the carrier had picked Pixo "after extensive evaluations". Nothing in the document mentions the iPod.

Pixo went into Sun Software under Jonathan Schwartz and came out as the Sun Content Delivery Server. The domain records the handover inside six weeks: pixo.com served its own site, titled "Pixo: Wireless Java Downloading and more", until 15 October 2003, and by 30 November it was redirecting into Sun's product page for the delivery server. The domain answers today with a MarkMonitor notice, which is what a brand-protection service leaves on a name that is worth holding and not worth using. Oracle bought Sun in 2010.

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