27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020) | Hacker News Reader

27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)

mcgst.com

341 pointsbishopsmother282 comments

Lots of focus on the hardware here but its form factor still exists in niches.

What has vanished, is our ability to do general-purpose computing at ~8MHz. Consider the computers you had in the 90s. Windows 3.11 and Office ran on a 286 but I sit here with 12 cores at ~4Ghz just to post this crumby comment.

We are spoilt. It really makes me yearn to do more with less.

I think that looking at it from a MHz standpoint is a red herring. How many things can you do per watt now, than you could per watt then?

And power consumption is a —among other things— a function of transistor size and process. A lot has changed in 30 years, but our methods of programming these things has veered towards incredible wastefulness.

To put it another way, how much longer battery life would that same psion get if the CPU/board was made with modern transistor sizes.

But demand for software has also grown a lot in that period. If we trained software engineers and demanded quality to the same standards, we would not be able to meet demand.

Those standards were also set by the limitations of hardware, not because people had the will to do better back then.

Better ask, how many things you could do per watt now, if software had that era's leanness?

I occasionally fire up Windows 95 in a VM and marvel at how fast it is. Sometimes I use it for actual tasks, although it is hard to find things Windows 95 is useful for nowadays. My copy has office 97 installed, and I use that for some spreadsheety tasks.

I really like being able to click anything and know I won't see a loading spinner.

Gosh windows 95 was great - especially the ability to navigate the OS from the keyboard alone - At one point I knew W95 so well I could literally navigate the OS by hand without a screen.

An aquaintance at one point changed all the graphics settings to black - so ever screen, menu, text etc was black and you couldnt see anything. I was able to help her by using just the keyboard to navigate to settings and restore defaults. I did it from memory and key-clicks.

Also, it was a fun OS to fuck with people in the nascient realm of virus' of the time, there was setting the desktop as an image and hiding whatever was actually on the desktop so nobody could click on things... remote access BSODs etc.

I'm on an HP flagship gaming laptop now and it consumes probably 1,000 times more power (watts) and Compute to just display this single text entry form on HackerNews than any W95 machine back in the day...

In ~1997 or so I had to shutdown a branch office in San Diego and when I did so, we had a number of plastic sealed boxes of brand-new W95 on 3.5" floppies... I kept them for over a decade and then sold them on Ebay as collectors items for $75 each... and wrote a tale about how they were computing history.

But I had a PDA in 1993 which was by CASIO - and it had a little spreadsheet app on it, and I made a Gematria translator app in it - so I could type in any words and its formulae would spit out all the Gematria numbers for a name (the Celestine Prophecy was a famous book of the time)

That PDA was similar to this one, but less sophisticated - and I had that thing for ~25 years... but unlike OP I didnt take out the battery and it ruind the device.

Back when phones had physical keypad buttons and T9 text, I could send a message without taking the phone out of my pocket. It looked suspicious though

As fond of memories as I have of the time I used Windows 95 and how much I learned from using it as a pre-teen, I mostly remember my maintenance schedule of reinstalling by the entire OS about once every month or so when it broke. I guess that jumpstarted my lifelong career/hobby of computer fuckery.

My first PDA was a Casio too, I don't remember which exact model but it was a Pocket Viewer and it was great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Viewer

My "true" PDA was an Audiovox Maestro I got used off of eBay. I even got a compact flash modem adapter so I could dial-up using it. I was shocked to see almost 10 years later when I got my first smart phone, a T-Mobile Dash 3G, that the OS had barely changed since the Audiovox Maestro back then!

Not sure there's a point to any of this except my own anecdotal trip down memory lane :)

Edit: autocorrect fail

"Memories... they're basically the only thing you have to think back on"

-- Steven Write

---

I love "anecdotal trips down memory lane" -- because its stunning how much I have done and known in my life that I forget.

I truly regret not listening to my mom's advice to journal.

Well, UX is a spectrum. You can do things instantly on a very old machine if you don't mind using a cli. If what you want to do is a game, you can't get Cyberpunk, but you can get Pacman.

Imagine the speed you could play Pacman on a modern CPU! You could probably play a whole level in nanoseconds.

Oh, I often do. It increases productivity by orders of magnitude.

Oh, but what if you had a text based implementation of cyberpunk? Where your imagination is the GPU (the best one there is)

Alas, my imagination is also text-based (aphantasia).

You mean like A Mind Forever Voyaging?

Apparently 30 days of things, per the article.

Most computers are inefficient per watt due to waiting on IO from the human.

There's always something running in the background (usually dozens of system services) so that's not a problem - plus they scale their consumption depending on power.

Plus the waiting on IO is when they're NOT doing something. When they do (playing video, listing files and rendering thunbnails, processing video in an editing app, rendering the next frame in game, playing a synth part in a music app, applying an effect on a photo, recalculating an Excel after a change, and so on) is when you want them to be fast.

> I think that looking at it from a MHz standpoint is a red herring. How many things can you do per watt now, than you could per watt then?

Obviously a lot more. The OP said the thing could run in two AAs for a month.

Nowadays, almost nothing can last a month on one charge/set of batteries. The only thing I can think of that might pass is a Kindle, due to the trick where it's literally shut down almost all the time.

I have a ton of devices that would disagree with you. If you run the Psion software on modern hardware, it'll run for two months.

Of course not, because no device can run at super low wattage with such an hypothetical OS.

It's not a hypothetical OS, it's what the Psion runs, and why not?

I did not know that the Psion OS is available for modern SOCs.

It isn't.

The Psion 3, 3A, 3C and 3MX ran EPOC, a proprietary 8086 OS with preemptive multitasking and a full keyboard-only GUI.

But their successors, the Psion 5, 5MX and netBook, ran a rewrite called EPOC32. That was written in C++, is native to ARM, and ran well in 4MB and very well in 8MB. Full preemptive multitasking, touchscreen GUI, networking, IPv4 and more, FAT32 and networking support.

That later was rebranded as Symbian and was the first mass-market smartphone OS. It was the only smartphone OS that could run the GSM comms stack on the same CPU as the user facing GUI OS -- its realtime support was that good. iOS, Android, WinCE, all need a separate CPU with its own RTOS for that.

Symbian is now 100% FOSS.

https://github.com/SymbianSource

It's a crime and a tragedy that nobody's picked it up and ported it to any modern SOC. It is much richer and more complete than any other modern C++ OS such as Genode or Serenity OS.

Ultra low power processors exist:

"GreenArrays is shipping its 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ/inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle).

Tight coding to minimize instructions executed will minimize power. The programmer can also reduce instruction fetches, transistor switching and duty cycle.

Chuck Moore

GreenArrays, Inc."

Source: https://youtu.be/0PclgBd6_Zs

They just are not widely used because ARM and similar processors offer much more computational power and people are happy charging their devices every day or so.

> They just are not widely used because ARM and similar processors offer much more computational power and people are happy charging their devices every day or so.

This is exactly my point. Ultra low power processors exist, but they're not used for consumer electronics. Developers would rather build something bloated, quickly, than take the time to optimize. And technological advancements has taken away a lot of the pressure for optimization (e.g. I'm sure it was a super high priority to get a Psion to sip power, because a recharge was going to the store and paying $4 for a set of new batteries).

If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.

> If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed[^W*] on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.

*"tested"/"run during development exclusively"

You still want the text editor and more importantly compiler to run on beefy workstation hardware, in order to avoid programmer productivity problems like long compilation times[0] and to take advantage of CPU-intensive optimization techniques.

0: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/303

> If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.

Agreed! I wish there were widespread ways of throttling CPU and memory given to desktop applications today. If I'm testing a web application, I tell Firefox to throttle my network down to GPRS and see the responsiveness (or lack thereof) and once my work is done and GPRS is reasonably fast (or whatever) I can give a quick glance at normal 4G speeds and see my web app screams now.

So why can't I lock a desktop application to settings like "an unused 386 PC with 24MB of RAM"?

That's pointless since you need to recharge your device all the time. It's not progress if you have a lighter that needs gas every 2 minutes to work.

Except the lighter nowadays is a flamethrower. You can get a lighter that needs gas every month, or a flamethrower that needs gas every two minutes, but complaining that the flamethrower needs much more gas than the lighter is silly.

The problem is there are only flamethrowers now and no lighters.

I'm fairly sure you can still boy dumb phones that last a week+ though.

I think the argument is that we mostly want to accomplish the same sorts of things, but now we have to use a flamethrower.

But we don't, even the fact that we browse the Web and watch videos would have been impossible on a Nokia 3210.

We have been doing all of this since the 90s at least on desktop computers. Smartphones today are far more powerful than desktop computers from that era.

> doing all of this since the 90s at least on desktop computers

it wasn’t a very nice experience. Why would I want to watch anything in 240p win stead of 4k? Same for web, despite the bloat UX on most websites is miles ahead of what was common back in ~2000

Probably the memory is more relevant. 1 or 2 MB!

Ive looked for a 5mx form factor in the form of a phone and not been able to find it.

Did you find the Gemini PDA and friends? It's very very similar.

Wish I had heard about these before getting my GPD Win2. Looks much closer to what I wanted but didn't know was still an option.

I've got the GPD Win 2 and it really would be the perfect little computer if it had HP 100LX style calculator keys. I know people disagree with me on this, but it's the one style of tiny keyboard that I have been able to achieve a relatively fast typing speed with.

I like the form factor. There's a couple quirks with the screen and some apps/games but I can work around those. The real thing that keeps me from using it more is the heat/fan noise.

I can't use it anywhere quiet because of the whizzing sound it generates even just at idle, let alone when I do something. With games on the go it's not a problem, but any kind of productivity work like editing code isn't possible.

I saw there were some mods for cooling but I don't believe they're available anymore. Best I've been able to do is under-volt it to lower CPU performance, but that only gets me so far. I'm open to suggestions, though!

Planet Computers? https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/

One day I will find an excuse to get one of these; they induce a heavy sense of nostalgia but I just don’t know what I’d do with it

It's a superb portable writing tool, as was the Psion 5 in its day. The keyboard is better than anything available on any tablet or pocketable device in the world in any market. It's that good. No Surface or iPad addon comes even close; it is an order of magnitude better than any mainstream vendor's offering.

I found it almost useless as a phone or tablet, though. But I have several of those so I don't care.

I highly recommend against anything from these guys. The software situation was dreadful, they pumped out new nearly-identical hardware too quick without fixing gemini issues. Seems like a cash grab. My Gemini PDA sits in my closet, I consider it near-useless with its electrically buggy keyboard and old android/ubuntu images.

The PinePhone with its keyboard addon should fix most if not all issues the Gemini PDA had, but it looked so similar I still couldn't bring myself to get the keyboard for it. Plus I don't like the layout at all.

MNT Pocket Reform seems very promising (but expensive). Good layout and reprogrammable keyboard. Not stuck on an old Android version.

The pinephone would be perfect were it possible to install, e.g. android banking apps on it.

Same here. I had a gemini but beside the poor software there was also the wobbliness of the display hinge that was super annoying. It was because they made it of springy metal.

Also, the keyboard looks the exact same as the Psion 5's but the mechanism is much worse.

I could have written your comment! Though I sold mine.

I followed pocket reform closely but the thickness of it, combined with the price, put me off. It’s not the same class of device as Psion, Gemini, or the UMPCs.

Just for balance:

I have a Gemini. I love it and still use it. The keyboard remains world-class, best of breed in any pocket-sized device. The OS is dated but still works fine and connectivity to Dropbox, gDrive, OneDrive etc. is very handy and mostly missing from desktop Linux.

As a pocketable laptop replacement it is unequalled, for this writer.

Don’t get me wrong I’m very glad they built it, happy to share some risk to get a niche product to market, and used it as a daily driver for some time.

Curious though, did the whole unit bounce, with the screen wobbling back and forward, when you typed?

Nope, it's pretty firm. The design isn't as good as the Psion 5, but it's OK. I mainly place it on my lap on something like a book, or preferably, on a desk or tabletop. Then I can type on it at about 60 WPM, which is about 3/4 of my speed on a full-sized keyboard such as my preferred IBM Model M.

I occasionally can't remember where a character is, but I tell myself it's where it would be on a Psion and 20th century muscle memory kicks in and I just hit that combo.

Interesting. I've heard other reports of the hinge wobbling. I wonder if there was a production issue with the material or geometry or something.

Found this random video on youtube. You can see it wobbling at 15 seconds, though mine was more accentuated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opmb6jbeBY4

Interesting. No, I haven't noticed that. Maybe if one particular unit's keyboard works well, you don't have to hit the keys so hard, so it doesn't push down on the hinge mechanism.

Psion's own hinge mech was far better, but PlanComp only licensed the keyboard, not the case. I proposed a fatter "pro" model with a bigger battery that was the same size, shape and form factor as the original, so it'd fit in original cases. I still have several.

I was shouted down by Americans whose internal airlines apparently have or had some stupid limit on the size of battery you can carry on board. In Europe any battery over a certain limit has to be carried in the cabin, so if it fails the crew can extinguish it.

Just tried a gemini from them this month, and the software support is awful. Highly recommend against

I found the forums in which people had provided recipes for updates to Debian and Android to be helpful but it was a lot of work and should have been supported by the vendor, I agree.

They never released fully functional Linux support

>They never released fully functional Linux support

Which is something that killed my interest dead for their hardware despite being exactly the kind of person who should fit their profile for a customer. But if they're willing to lie about Linux support, what else will they lie about? SO I continue to look...

I had a gemini, but the hinge fell apart Shame, I quite liked it.

I have an Astro Slide 5G from them (though bought via ebay) and I'm happy with my purchase, but it's kind of hard to recommend. Their track record on actually shipping pre-orders is kinda lousy (why I resorted to buying one second hand), the keyboard has some quality control issues and the software side feels a bit half-baked. For instance, there's almost always an undismissable "System Update" notification despite no updates being available. They did recently ship a system update which fixed some issues so they haven't abandoned it, but they have a ways to go still.

I really want them to succeed. It's such a cool device

Not to overly denigrate some of the more pessimistic reply here, I have to say that my Gemini was easily one of the best computers (not just phone) I ever had.

The keyboard was fantastic (better than the much larger GPD Pocket 1 that I also got at the same time), and with a fully-fleshed out termux install, I ended up coding on that thing far more than I probably should have.

Yes, Planet Computers have a very poor record on delivering machines (still waiting for my Astro Slide), but the hardware, when done right (Planet again are poor when it comes to QA, which might explain some of the other responses), is great.

I think the keyboard designer (who also did the original Psuon 5 keyboards, back in the day - I had one of those also), is really an idiot for letting his design be run into the ground by the sheer business incomptence that is Planet Computers. He should team up with a company that CAN deliver, then more could see that the great Psion5 isn't really dead

The pro1x from fxtec with lineageos plus termux is useful :-)

Looks nice, can't see pricing though. Their website https://www.fxtec.com/smartphones/pro1x shows "available March 2023" for me.

It has some issues, and no Android, pure GNU/Linux, but there's the pinephone and it's keyboard addon.

https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pinephone-pro-keyboard-...

But I think it's more a phone to thinker with, not a Just Works phone.

> What has vanished, is our ability to do general-purpose computing at ~8MHz.

ahem https://xkcd.com/768/

I know there's XKCD for everything but I wonder if there should be.

Considering how "on the nose" this one is, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

No. I bet you could make a slightly better one and increase diversity in the online humor world.

https://xkcd.com/927/

It's in the name of efficiency. Instead of repeating the same conversation about, say, standards, you can just say 927 (which is 900, Yoda's age, plus 27 which is memorable because of the 27-club. Or also 3 squared = 9 and 3 cubed = 27), and everyone will know what you're talking about and you can skip that bit of conversation.

And in small memory. I once had to prepare a church address list on a Psion 3 or 3a with 256kB of memory. That was total memory, used for both execution and battery backed RAM disk. I entered the addresses in to a database, exported to a spreadsheet for sorting and putting the columns in the right order, then exported to word processor document for formatting, and printed over IRDA. No third party sw required. And the thing was so stable even with third party sw that it was quite likely that it was never rebooted before it was replaced years later.

This is why I use previous generation Raspberry Pis and low end SBCs like OrangePi Zeros. Doing things in a constrained environment is fun and rewarding. Being able to run a full-fledged server with 512MB or less RAM is a great exercise and very enlightening to see what's possible.

When one can able to run code on these systems fast, it runs fast everywhere. Running with razor thin free space makes you prevent all memory leaks, and reduce temporary variables to save that space.

Doing great things with today's hardware is still possible, but laziness, "We needed this yesterday, I don't care about its efficiency, hardware is cheap anyway" mindset is killing things fast.

> Doing great things with today's hardware is still possible, but laziness, "We needed this yesterday, I don't care about its efficiency, hardware is cheap anyway" mindset is killing things fast.

It is, but realistically features will increase business long before efficiency starts to hamper it.

"let's MAKE MONEY now, fuck the energy we waste and the planet we kill, goddammit"

No, no. It’s not money. It’s value. Value for our customers, our employees, and most importantly, our shareholders.

Moot point when computing is incredibly efficient when compared to heavy industry.

Actually a very valid point when computing is incredibly hypocritical about their footprint when compared to heavy industry.

Well, considering the power consumption of the data centers and the heat they generate, I wouldn't call that "incredibly efficient".

Yes, a processor runs on ~1.5V, but that small post stamps generate incredible amounts of heat for what they do.

I can stand behind a rack of them to warm myself during prolonged work in our data center.

I keep wanting to fiddle with kubernetes on rPi class hardware. Even the minimalist versions want half a gigabyte per node. Admin software does not need half a gigabyte of memory.

If you want a kubernetes cluster to experiment, then k3s runs just fine on raspberry pi 4 hardware

It still wants half a gig on the nodes. They all want 500+MB

ZX-Spectrum clone (8 bit, 4 Mhz CPU) running Art Studio (an early Paint) loaded from floppy drive: https://imgur.com/a/VcaBnmP

So sort of, but let's not look at the past too wistfully. I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book). I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display. Farther back I remember not having the spare cash for the expansion card necessary to have lower case letters and typing in program listings out of books because that's how some software was distributed (Apple II). Our current generation of PCs is probably within a factor of two of the minimum spec necessary for robust machine translation and natural language interfaces. I enjoy using the old hardware but it really doesn't do most of the jobs we have now.

In every example you listed the limiting factor is memory or storage size, not computing speed.

> I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display.

What changed?

Modern Windows still requires language packs, but you can apparently switch your primary language without a reinstall.

Adobe products still corrupt already-correct Arabic text unless you have the correct edition or add-on or something.

It was indeed annoying to transfer files at least until the Internet and flash drives were widely available, but that’s been more than 20 years.

These limits of old hardware are exactly what makes the software so amazing.

Look what was achieved despite those limits. We've basically had the same desktop and productivity software for 30 years. Look at games like Doom or Tyrian, or what was happening on consoles and think about how crappy that hardware was.

Modern software is embarrassingly slow by comparison. I've been around long enough to know that's always been the way. Newer software drives new hardware sales and we're on yesteryear's supercomputers but why?

> Look what was achieved despite those limits. We've basically had the same desktop and productivity software for 30 years. Look at games like Doom or Tyrian, or what was happening on consoles and think about how crappy that hardware was.

I agree with the rest, but games are a comparatively bad example, almost a counterexample. A lot of them are basically the exception of what you're saying. Because the visual fidelity of games has overall steadily improved since the inception of computer games, with some astonishing milestones along the way.

So games are a category of software that did (and continues to do) make efficient use of ever-improving computer hardware. Not all of them, not in every aspect, but the overall progress is obvious.

Office software on the other hand...

Compared to productivity software, sure, but cycle-for-cycle, the 90s gaming was driven by developers like John Carmack and spiritual forebears who didn't just have to invent their gameplay metaphors, they had to find ways to trick hardware into doing things faster (a lot of mathematical shortcuts, but also working in the terms the hardware worked).

Again, I agree that gaming has come further, but I actually think the comparison works well because gaming is reaching that Windows 2k/XP plateau. We're waist-deep into diminishing returns now. Cyberpunk is the Windows Vista of gamedev. Gosh it's pretty at times but at an almighty cost, we're shovelling gold into our PCs to make generic compute modules work out how light interacts with virtual surfaces. Doesn't sound like gaming to me.

The software continues to get flabbier, demands more and more, and we have to keep up of we can't load Office in under 10 seconds, or play games at the native resolutions. It just feels wasteful.

> Compared to productivity software, sure, but cycle-for-cycle, [...] they had to find ways to trick

That's true, but I think the idea was more that other software has not only been mostly stagnant (that, too), but often actually regressing in performance. Games on the other hand have been steadily improving. Maybe not keeping up the full pace, as the mathematical and hardware tricks became unnecessary and were traded in for ease of development, but game developers at least overall did make use of the better hardware. They stopped doing the super clever stuff when it was just not necessary anymore while still providing better fidelity.

> Doesn't sound like gaming to me.

Eh, it's part of it. And it's not like other aspects did not profit from the better hardware as well. Later Civilization titles are pretty compute-intensive between turns, for more complex gameplay. Earlier chess programs had to "think" a very long time for not that great chess performance...

> So sort of, but let's not look at the past too wistfully.

why?

> I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book).

2MB is 2 million bytes, The average book is something like 0.5

> I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display.

This is a bad thing?

> Farther back I remember not having the spare cash for...

lol, irrelevant!

> Our current generation of PCs is probably within a factor of two of the minimum spec necessary for robust machine translation and natural language interfaces.

I have no idea what you just said. People for the most part read/write text and watch videos. This would work much better if we eliminated compute entirely.

> I enjoy using the old hardware but it really doesn't do most of the jobs we have now.

imho the way to look at old hardware is to look at only the good features we've lost. For example, I cant think of anything I want from a c64 except from sprite collision and having menu entries starting with function keys [F1] because that worked so insanely fast compared to a mouse. The rest was just coping with the state of the art.

The person you're replying to was talking about the Apple II era, when floppies held less than 200k at best. Availability of 2.44 MB floppy drives was an extremely late development, and IIRC rare to actually find in the wild.

Extremely rare. I never encountered one, and I had a lot of niche stuff in the 90s.

1.44MB was the effective capacity of floppies until they died out. There was stuff like VGACopy that could format them with higher capacity (since floppy controller access was fairly low level), but it was an uncommon thing among tinkerers, the disks themselves were not marketed for more than 1.44MB, and I doubt they were tested above their nominal capacity (and even at that they were not exactly known as super reliably).

There never was a 2.44MB disk. You're muddling up 1.44MB (which were really 1.4MB) and 2.88MB.

I remember using a mechanical keyboard, imagine having to replace the paper every page with your hands! If one was to argue that is a significant hurdle in writing a book I would also have a hard time containing my cynicism.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Sholes-G...

What a marvel of engineering. All I got is plastic boxes. Thinking about it I'm not sure if having the next paragraph written by a different person is actually a good idea. Organizing your notes into a book undisturbed by better men is sure to impress a lot more. I would hope the final draft of my book about antique hardware wouldn't quote someone who remembers the bad parts better than the good.

Sure, but to that note, we've been at "enough computer" for a vast array of tasks for a long, long time now.

Obviously, things that move boatloads of bits (mostly media) have well benefited from the vast amounts of RAM and incredible bandwidth of modern machines. And, of course, video games, which will always push limits.

But outside of that, word processing, data collecting, "printing checks from AP", those peaked a long time ago. And, of course, I appreciate how businesses collect vast amounts of data today (because they can, because storage is free), but core business functions, transaction processing, that's pretty well plateaued as well.

I don't think this is very true. Let's take word processing for example, with say Word 5.1 on a Quadra 700 as a highish end (probably $10k in today's dollars) setup available in around 1992: In a narrow sense typing US English on a keyboard and being able to print it was fairly well solved. It would feel slow to someone with today's machines but it wasn't that bad. On the other hand if you shared with someone else in the early 90s odds are it was by handing off a floppy disk. Did you remember to include the necessary fonts? Oh wait, does the other end have a new enough version of PostScript installed? Does it all fit on one disk? Most languages in the world either required a different OS install or were fully unsupported.

Today all of this stuff is pretty well resolved, but at a cost. Easy sharing and interactive collaboration over network is built on protocols like TLS that would be very slow even on the Quadra. The networks that runs over use an amount of compute that rivals supercomputers of the 90s (for one example just look at channel correction in MIMO radios). The disk footprint of all the fonts, languages, etc, is mitigated by storing them server-side, but this is all usable due to how fast networks are now. Machine translation means you can work across a language divide. Dictation is a win for accessibility and avoiding RSI. All of this is available on a Chromebook or iPad that is more reliable than the Quadra, runs on a battery, and is 50x cheaper.

We're not done, just as today spell check and grammar check are widely accepted as table stakes in another ten years features like built-in writing coach, editing, and research assistant features will likely be considered basic requirements with all the hardware needed to support that.

And that's just word processing.

FWIW, I ran across the splitting-text-into-files problem on Android using one of the highly-recommended note-taking apps.

Discovering Termux and having a large suite of Linux terminal-based tools available resolved that and many, many, many more frustrations.

On a positive note, HN is one of the very few sites left which is still simple enough to be used with older browsers. I am writing this comment in the text console (no X11) of a Raspberry Pi 3 with a braille display (no monitor connected) as the output device. Using lynx as a pretty reliable browser. It is the exception, I know, I am a freak by nature of my disability, but I am also proud to know this niche still exists and it is actually possible to do some interesting things online with very little resources.

It’s annoying because so much content SHOULd be perfectly accessible as described, but frameworks and browsers just fight it at every step.

Too bad Apache didn’t have a Gopher server built in by default.

That surprises me.

I'm a webdev and I've long considered HN to be a bit of an atrocity in terms of markup and a11y. Nested tables, no sr text to explain the thread structure, JS-only links scattered around. It works but only by the mercy of many text-based browsers being started in the 90s, so they're used to this pre-semantics rubbish.

I can't tell if it's hubris but if I were king for a day, I'd like to think I'd leave HN in a better state. At the very least, I'd clean up the cruft.

Wow, I never knew HN layout was using tables. That was surprising, all this years and I never checked.

HN loads large amounts of comments really quickly on my phone's browser and there's no jank or lag when navigating it, and no popups. I love it, especially compared to the pain of using Reddit's mobile site for similar comment-browsing tasks

The table layout on the main page is more of a problem for a modern web bgrowser then it is actually for Lynx. Modern browsers will announce the table, and your position in it, which is totally irrelevant on the main page. That is definitely the wrong semantic tag for the job at hand. It should be a ordered-list, because that is what it is. However, most markup things tends to get rendered quite nicely in Lynx. The only thing I notice which I somethimes wish would work differently is the lack of the ability to know who is replying to whom...

Psion 3c was what got me into programming!

My grandfather gave me his old one when I was a kid. To an 11-year-old, a spreadsheet, world clock, and address book gets old pretty fast :)

But the in-built OPL [1] language provided unlimited possibilities. You can see the icon for it in one of the screenshots.

I remember printing off a copy of the 300-page language manual I found online (breaking dad’s printer in the process). Now 20 years later and I have Psion/OPL to thank for my career.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Programming_Language

I started with OPL on a Pison Series 3 (“no bloody A, B, C, or D!”) with 128 kbytes of storage — unlimited potential but limited resources… my first project was to code up something that looked like John Connor’s ATM-cracking program from Terminator 2.

For those that don't get the reference: https://youtu.be/qTOP1BezOB8

It is green.

No so long ago, around 2012 :), I was still using my Psion 3c + a short OPL program, to trigger my hacked time lapse camera over serial line. It worked quite reliably for years. https://forums.4fips.com/viewtopic.php?t=717

That’s neat!

Funnily enough, my next foray into coding (after OPL) would be scripting timelapses on my Canon PowerShot with CHDK [1] — wish I’d thought of doing it with a Psion though.

[1] https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK

Exactly the same here. Stole my fathers Psion 3a and wrote a lottery number picker in OPL. IIRC, it even had pretty great syntax to easily draw the various default OS UI elements.

The ability to write the application and then run it on the same mobile device was such a rewarding feedback loop as a kid. There were some pretty good books on OPL in the 90s too.

The standard of the third party gaming ecosystem for the OS (EPOC) was shockingly good for the time as well really, there was an amazing golf game, also written in OPL. That Steve Litchfield name I remember a lot from the era, he was extremely active developing OPL software:

> https://stevelitchfield.com/fairway.htm

This little comment thread made me smile! Psion 3 (no letter) was my first PDA when I was about 12 and then I upgraded to a Psion 3c. After graduating from BASIC on my father's Acorn A3000 and A5000 my first apps on my own computing device were OPL shareware. It's where I got my love of what would become open source for me. I also did work experience at the Psion Factory when I was 15 because I grew up nearby (yes, they were actually manufactured in Greenford in West London, in a warehouse behind the B&Q on the A40).

I visited there a few times to get my touch-key strip repaired. It was a 5min cycle ride from where I lived when I first moved to London.

I will never understand why we do not have this kind of device anymore. A small computer, running linux, proper keyboard, integrated LTE - it would be a messaging and writing dream.

Back in the days i developed custom software for the Revo, the SDK was a dream to work with as well.

A high quality screen is much cheaper to design and build than a high quality keyboard, that's why.

Also half of the people buying these devices are buying for the show. This is why MacBooks are still called $2000 Facebook Machine sometimes.

You're wrong about Macbooks. They're $2000 Reddit machines now.

Thanks! Oh, looks like I'm old now. :c

Reddit is for old geezers, so I doubt any of the above answers is in any way in touch with 2023.

And I'm not sure who calls Macbooks "$2000 Facebook machines". That sounds like the ancient DOS era bs that "Macs are toys" (funny, the PC ended getting all the gamers and meat-and-potatoes OS needs, i.e. email+web, older people).

In the west, where they can afford it, a huge chunk of programmers, graphic designers, data analysts, video editors, musicians, writers, etc use Macbooks, disproportionally more so than the general public's share of macOS, or the share of those professions on Linux).

>Reddit is for old geezers

Please let all the Gen-Z-ers know they should vacate Reddit.

Actually, I'm not a youngfolk, and I'm not bothered by it. It was just a joke.

Well, as a macOS + Linux user (for almost 2 decades), there were tons of "$2000 Facebook Machine" memes around. I remember rich kids getting them alongside shiny iPhones to put them on their tables at Starbucks to "show" them.

I, for one, code and post-process photos on both macOS and Linux, and generally happy about how they interoperate.

Also, I aim to continue to keep this Linux desktop + macOS notebook arrangement indefinitely, because it makes my life much easier and enjoyable.

Change “the West” into “mostly America”.

There is still a decent chunk of Apple users in Europe, but it is a far cry from the extreme obsession America seems to have with Apple devices.

Well, US has a market share for macOS of around 20% and Europe of around 7-8% from what I can find.

I'd also wager the main culprit is the 20-30% price hike of Macs in Europe (in absolute numbers - it's even worse considering the lower wages in most of European countries compared to the US), rather than any particular dislike.

This just gave me a thought.

Perhaps if the EU eventually does something to sufficiently cripple Apple there, maybe Europe can be a hospitable location for a competitor besides Google to get a toehold someday either in smartphones or whatever the successor is. The duopoly sucks.

macOS is not particularly closed in comparison to Windows, though. The opposite in fact in some ways..

> or the share of those professions on Linux

Lol This argument keeps getting reused over and over. The main reason Linux is not used is lazy sysadmins who only care to support Windows and MacOS for other employees. This argument has as much convincing power as "elections" held in separatists regions of Ukraine.

I do have macbook offered by my job, yes it's definitely better than windows, and yes i would take a linux laptop any day

Not really. MacOS is also heavily used in companies where you can have your pick of OS.

>This argument has as much convincing power as "elections" held in separatists regions of Ukraine.

So, a lot, given the demographics.

> So, a lot, given the demographics

This is so dumb I am not even going to explain why, enjoy swimming в море говна, и подлечись от идиотизма когда будет возможность

> This is so dumb

To be fair you used are the one who used this absolutely brilliant argument:

> The main reason Linux is not used is lazy sysadmins who only care to support Windows and MacOS for other employees.

Because it would be utterly useless for the 99.999% of the population.

And also because, like any dreams of that kind, it's better if it remains as such, you really do not want to see it shattered if anyone actually made such a device

Would beg to differ. Many people would love to a e-ink display (no color needed). It is better on the eye, and saves battery, and you can read it in the sunlight. It is not good for watching video, but I'm sure I'm not the only who don't like watching moving pictures on small screens. Most ppl just want to read and send text.

>Most ppl just want to read and send text.

no they don't, unless you are living in some alternate reality I'm not aware of

But it's just not how most people work. If you want to do something useful a MacBook Air, Windows eqv, or even just a Chromebook is hugely more productive. The keyboard is full sized, the screen is bigger, it's fast enough for Office (etc) and browsing, it has more memory, and it's not all that much heavier.

If you just want to read and send text, any phone will do. And it won't have the annoying slow update on e-ink display. (Have you tried typing on one?)

The Psions were nice toys, but not a lot more than that. I had a 5 and the build quality wasn't great. The pointer clip inside the body broke fairly quickly, and the covering on the device itself started peeling off.

The folding action was very clever and the software was decent enough. But I'm not sure I ever used it for anything except occasional notes and some basic spreadsheeting.

Its appeal was that it looked like a serious business-y microlaptop.

That was impressive when real laptops were still blocky, thick, and very heavy. Now that they're not, it doesn't really have a use case.

I have done programming work, for 'real things' (...) on a gpd pocket 1 for years fulltime. Works fine; that 'more productive' is just something you have, maybe for what you do. For me the pocket was (it broke) productive as I could just take it anywhere and it had 15 hours of battery life. My Macbook air I have to take out of my bag instead of my pocket, i have to bring my charger (battery life is good, but nowhere near 15 hours), I need a large enough table (in the airplane it's already quite annoying if you don't fly business), etc etc. I type as fast on that thing as on my macbook and i hardly use a trackpad/mouse anyway.

I would basically murder for an Apollo 3+ powered device with rLCD running on AAA batteries (the apollo is very battery friendly) with a keyboard. So like a modern Psion.

Now I use the Nreal with my phone + a MS foldable keyboard as laptop; still beats carrying a backpack with a laptop + charger (phone goes for 15+ hours) and it's a productivity win focus wise. Still would want something as described above as a companion OR powering the glasses.

> The Psions were nice toys, but not a lot more than that.

Absolutely the reverse of my own experience.

I used an Organizer II LZ32, a Series 3, 3A, 5, and finally 5MX.

The 5, for instance, paid for itself in creating work the same weekend I bought it -- work that I sold on Monday.

I still have a Sharp Zaurus SL-5000D here. it's an awesome little machine, with a full keyboard.

Keyboard open: https://tldp.org/LDP/Mobile-Guide/html/mobile-guide-p3c2s8-z...

Wikipedia (keyboard closed): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus

I loved mine back in the day. Also later had a Zaurus SL-C860 I had to order from Japan. I think that was the first computer I used as an eBook reader. Having a little Linux palmtop was magic back in the day.

I always lusted after several of the Psion models though, from the Psion 2 onwards. They were just such nicely designed things, even if you just looked at them as bits of industrial art.

I don't think it's too cynical to say that business models (i.e. targetted advertising) of the Psions of today just don't fit with this kind of device. I never owned one but I remember ogling them and their high prices (to a 10 year old) in the Argos catalogue. Looking back on them now, the joy seems to be in how they strike what seems to be the perfect balance of dis/connectedness.

I would love to see a good device with good (physical) keyboard too but it would be a niche one which would make it too expensive (would not be able to benefit from economy of scale). 99% user need a mobile device to consume content and may be make/share photos - mass produce smartphone/tabled (without a keyboard) works well for this.

You can still have it. You can order one at https://store.planetcom.co.uk

Comes preinstalled with android, but you can load linux on them instead if you so wish.

Looks brilliant - though a great pocketable folding keyboard and a 'normal' phone might be better for most people who want a keyboard. I had a brilliant folding Bluetooth keyboard that I used with my Nokia E61 before I used it with my Dell Streak - writing and editing text felt like a dream - but I could ditch the keyboard when it wasn't needed.

Last I tried on mine (admittedly several years ago) the linux side was severely underbaked.

Waiting for Linux to be available on the new one, using Android with a keyboard isn't a good experience it's one of the least polished / finished aspects of Android.

It's a nice object though - if I could run Ubuntu touch it would be good.

Don't

Mine is now have its hinge broken.

Also its battery is almost dead, have emailed Planet asking for replacement (and how much) - and have been ignored for WEEKS. Looking at online forums, some have been ignored for MONTHS.

Keyboard feels very sloppy. And some of them must be pressed very hard - while others register multiple clicks even when touched very lightly.

Forget about the camera - it sucks so bad compared to even a cheap chinese smartphone. Just use it to scan QR codes at most, and even that it have problems from time to time.

And so on, so on.

I can second that. Had the Gemini. Never used it much because everything was awkward about it, from the lack of software/firmware to the keyboard until two years later the battery expanded and was bending the case. Not only refused planetcomputers to replace it for free, the only option they gave me was paying £125.00 and sending it in. I've asked if they can send me a replacement battery so I can do it myself but they refused, pointing out safety issues with mailing a battery - while asking me to send the Gemini with the swollen battery to them.

I think I saw one of Planet Computers models or one close to it, and the keyboard keys felt like rubber keys with laptop caps glued on, not like real pantograph or scissors keys. I felt I dodged a bullet at that moment.

What's the battery life like? Every time I've looked for a modern Psion or TRS-80 Model 100, battery life is measured in hours instead of weeks which is a real bummer. With 30 years of improvements, a pair of AA batteries should be enough for months of daily use.

> proper keyboard

It can be better real estate management to use a Graffiti virtual keyboard - that is what some of us still use on Android.

The market is too small. I had a HP Jornada 720, and it dramatically changed how I worked. I followed the several later projects that tried to continue with small size, touch-typeable keyboard, and desktop compatible OS, but they all fizzled from lack of market interest.

Just adding...I haven't thought about these devices for a long time, but now looking at the things that are available, I realize I wouldn't even want one now. Notebook computers have become so light that it's not a hassle to carry one in my bag, and suspend mode works well enough for "instant on". There isn't the great advantage there used to be.

I think you are not wrong. Blackberries used to be enormously popular. Same with various Nokia business phones that had full keyboards. Or their meego phones, which had full keyboards as well.

The formfactor did not really fail in the market but it just completely disappeared along with their software platforms. The thing that actually failed in the market was those software platforms. Keyboards were just collateral damage.

Android and hardware keyboards never really were a thing. I think there were a few niche models but none from mainstream manufacturers like Samsung. At least I don't recall anything that was seriously marketed in this space in recent history.

Apple actually sells keyboard covers with their ipads and they are super popular because real keyboards are essential for knowledge workers. But nothing similar is available for the iphone. There's nothing preventing that from happening except Apple deciding for their users that tiny touch screen keyboards are good enough when on the ipad, which has a much bigger touch keyboard it clearly isn't. I can see a contradiction here. That can't both be true.

A few reasons I can see that might explain why manufacturers don't like the idea:

1) it adds cost and introduces more failure modes (mechanical issues, keys failing, etc.). Apple knows a thing or two about failing keyboards.

2) it makes the devices thicker. Swappable batteries disappeared for the same reason. Once Apple got away with gluing in the battery to make the phone thinner, everybody else copied that and never looked back.

3) Android support for this would complicate UI and the touch keyboard appearing. That probably is a minor one and fixable but I given that there are few android phones with keyboards, probably not a lot of testing is happening for this. IOS seems to actually handle this nicely on the ipad.

Having used a few very robust Nokia models with keyboards, I think especially business users would appreciate a modern take on that formfactor. I don't think anyone gave this a serious try recently. Instead everybody seems to obsess about curved screens, folding screens, adding lots of camera lenses that mostly go unused, etc. So, manufacturers attempt to differentiate with features that don't really matter; which seems like it's a race to the bottom. But those same struggling vendors seem to avoid doing things that might actually differentiate them more meaningfully. Things like keyboards, swappable batteries, etc.

Android apps are just not setup with a keyboard in mind. Chuck an adapter and a usb keyboard onto your phone or android TV, and you will quickly experience how painful it gets.

Little things like weird tab order, or widgets not giving feedback when they are focused add up to a bad experience.

Don't forget that with the Blackberry there was a massive image factor: if you had one, that implied you were important enough to need messaging on the go. The form factor was almost incidental. As full text messaging became ubiquitous it lost its cachet.

Blackberries were expensive because you needed to pay extra for the BES Exchange Server Sync package, which corporate phones usually needed. The status symbol aspect of it faded because as it turns out, people do not enjoy being at the beck and call of their employers.

>Android and hardware keyboards never really were a thing.

The very first android phone (HTC dream) had a great keyboard.

The first popular (heavily marketed) Android phone in the US (Moto Droid) as well.

HTC Touch Pro 2, G1, G2 and Desire Z - the last great landscape keyboard phones.

The GDP Pocket 3 https://www.gpd.hk/gpdpocket3 comes very close to your requirements.

I like it. On the other hand, for this amount of money (1000€) i can buy a Macbook Air M1 which is somewhat bigger but also much more usable.

So while i lust after such a tiny device, in real life i'm pretty happy with the more practical form factor dictated by the keyboard size.

There are still niche products like uConsole[1] which runs on battery, but the first shipment is delayed.

[1] https://www.clockworkpi.com/uconsole

There are several devices like that. But I guess most people use their phones + bt keyboard.

There are very similar things available. https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/popular-items/prod... is basically mimicking the Psion 5 in its physical design, and there are a number of other very small laptops around like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09FQ7QNFB/ or GPD's various models if you want higher specs and have the cash to flash, and so on.

But for longer messaging on the move (and occasionally other things like SSH for emergency admin) I find a small external keyboard (bluetooth or USB) and stand for my phone does the trick. You can also get keyboards with built-in stands (or cases with built-in keyboards) so you could use them while standing, though that isn't what I currently have. This has the advantage of not needing a second full device (my main phone is always with me) and not always having the extra size/weight of the keyboard in your pocket (as you would if you use a device with a full keyboard as your primary comms unit). Whether such an arrangement would be similarly optimal for you depends on how often you would actually need it: while having the keyboard for long messages and other writing is really nice when I do use it, it is fairly rare that I can't just wait until I've got a laptop or PC in front of me.

I find as I get older and my eyesight isn't quite as good that what I want for that sort of use case is an external keyboard and a monocle, or some other head-mounted display. Any portable device with a stand that's any smaller than a laptop means leaning over and squinting.

Regarding head mounted display - I've been wanting to try something like NReal Air Ar glasses. Sounds like it fits your description:

https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/y155e1/my_nom...

Hm. They look very interesting. Wonder if there's anywhere I could try them out. I wear glasses for mild astigmatism, and I've always wondered if that's a blocker. For things like https://brilliant.xyz/ that's obviously less of an issue, but also they aren't aiming at the same sort of display.

Oh now that's even more interesting. Apparently they include a normal frame behind the display, so you can have your optician fit prescription lenses.

They're in a reasonable price range, too. Looking better and better. Thanks for the suggestion!

A foldable might help in that departement, but you definitely sacrifice pocketability.

It wouldn't be able to cope with Electron. Or the "modern" Web in general.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Most people think - if I'm already carrying a smartphone carrying a second computer seems like overkill. If you want a better keyboard just get a Bluetooth one.

How about a Pinephone with the keyboard case?

Never tried it myself as I am holding off for the software stack to stabilise. But it certainly looks promising:

https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-pinephone-pro-keyboard-...

Nowadays you need a modern web browser which is a resource hog.

I had a Psion series 5mx and it was amazing. The keyboard was not quite big enough for me to touch type, but it was fast enough to take notes. The apps were extremely well made despite greyscale screen. Where I was, the most popular competitor were Palm devices. The larger screen and integrated keyboard made me feel like a king compared to those around me using Palm devices. I was sad to hear that Psion was pivoting to phone operating systems with Symbian and did not get a chance to try any of their other devices or form factors (Psion series 7, netPad, etc.)

Later I had a Blackberry Curve. It had the best keyboard and form factor for mobile typing I have ever used. The keys were smaller than the virtual ones on onscreen smartphone keyboards, but even today I prefer the physical buttons and cannot type as fast or as accurately as I could on the Curve.

Today I use an Android smartphone with Termux (https://termux.dev/en/) and occasionally bring along an external bluetooth keyboard if I plan to use it for more serious work. If there were a mainstream brand Android smartphone with an integrated physical keyboard, I would buy one immediately. There are a few off-brand smartphones with physical keyboards, but they are not well-maintained (typically running older versions of Android with few or no security updates) and some have questionable build quality and heritage (e.g. might come with factory-installed malware).

Is Linux the right choice? It feels so heavy.

Could you make a Linux handheld that can run for 30 days on two AA batteries? Considering Psion made theirs 27 years ago, it seems like today we should be able to get a year or more out of two AA batteries.

A Kindle 4 runs Linux and has a 750mAh battery, which when multiplied by 3.7V gives 2.8 Wh.A single AA battery has nearly 4Wh, so two of them give nearly triple the capacity of a Kindle 4. A Kindle 4 lasts for a good month under light use, by suspending the CPU whenever the user isn't actively interacting with the UI. You could certainly make a productive Linux-based PDA that ran for a long time on AAs, provided you wrote custom software.

I have the tech-fetish desire for such a thing, but at the same time I realize that my iPad plus its keyboard case is a far more usable thing. It's bigger, but the size pays for itself with the screen.

I guess if you're not interested in a thing unless it runs Linux, that's not a useful option for you, but for me and my purposes it's excellent.

Companies don't want to sell computers anymore, they want to sell dumb clients that direct consumers to doing everything inside of the safety of their walled gardens.

It's not Linux, but you can roughly get this form factor with mainstream devices without having to take a risk on small companies or crowdfunded projects. There are hinged laptop-style cases for the iPad Mini. iPadOS is generally good with keyboard shortcuts so that would be a decent combo as long as you can put up with the limitations of the OS.

Zagg sells a hinged keyboard that works with 7 inch tablets. I bought one alongside an Amazon Fire 7 inch during a black friday sale. Thought it would be fun to have a mini laptop for around $50. The two worked well in conjunction. Was even almost pocketable. But the Fire was slow. If someone spent all their time in Termux, the Fire might have been fast enough.

It's a pity the 7 inch Windows tablets didn't sell well and have largely vanished from the market. One could install Linux on them, and use them with something like the Zagg keyboard.

I guess there's one more possible option. Boox's eink tablets have support for BT keyboards. Pair the 8 inch model with one of the hinged keyboards. As long as the screen can keep up with the typing (I have no idea) that might work well.

I have used a boox tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard (actually an iPad keyboard with hinges) there is nontrivial latency while typing, but I found it was quite manageable. It just forces you to keep more of the command or line of text in your head. I found myself writing on it a lot. Even did a little programming.

Interesting, when or which device did you try this on?

On my Boox Nova 3, typing via the BT Keyboard is pretty much instant, no noticable delay. Though in Word or Outlook it helps to choose the faster screen mode. No issues in Termux though.

Boox note 2

> There are hinged laptop-style cases for the iPad Mini

This still makes for a very different form factor to the original Psion devices, which are much more letterbox shaped than most small tablets, more akin to phones. Doing this you end up with something more like a modern "netbook".

You could slip a Psion 3a comfortably into the inside pocket of many suits, not a trick you can do with many 7 inch tablet toting a keyboard case as well.

Arguably a typical touchscreen phone with a hypothetical hinged clamshell keyboard case would be a lot closer, but of course not everything works in landscape on an iPhone.

The short-lived Motorola Droid is some of the closest anything in the smartphone era got to the spirit of the original devices for me:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

Because you can type much faster on an onscreen keyboard on any cheap Android tablet.

I did the test on my iPad, i reach around 70% of the typing speed compared to my favorite PC keyboard.

There are some Tablets that include a keyboard in the cover, so in the end you have the same functionality and much better usability.

Speak for yourself!

A good onscreen keyboard, such as Swype, can be fairly fast... but horribly horribly inaccurate so I need to spend more time correcting the message than entering it.

The same is true of speech recognition. Quick, but so inaccurate as to waste more time fixing the resultant text than just typing it by hand would have been.

Source: I broke my right arm in mid-April and have spent a LOT of time and money looking into text entry systems since, including the very latest available Apple and MS Windows offerings.

The Beepberry isn't far off: https://beepberry.sqfmi.com/ looks like it's got a Blackberry keyboard. Missing LTE, but since it's just a raspberry pi zero, you could probably hack one in directly to a serial port on the GPIO. Needs a case though, but 3D printing one shouldn't be hard.

But I think the general market for this kind of device is really tiny; phones and tablets can do this pretty well, and appeal to general consumers

A humble plug: the stealth mode startup where I work at is working on reviving the ethos of devices like Psion, Palm etc at a tablet form factor with a custom os. If you are intrigued, drop me a note at the email on my profile. Very happy to sign up folks on our email list!

This brings back happy memories. I was lucky enough to have the precursor, an Acorn Pocket Book, as part of my school curriculum. I lost it a few years ago in a move but I can still remember the the distinctive "device" smell (probably the case material). I yearned for the additional memory of the Psion 2. I would write lengthy stories that would fill up the memory. No off-device storage. I'd have to delete entries of birds i'd spotted and researched from cards app, tough decisions needed to be made.

Long before pokemon swept the west, our teacher would take us bird watching. We'd create entries in the cards app for each one we spotted, then research the birds in the library to fill out the entry. Then, as a class we'd trade (share) our research with each other.

Thank you for sharing this lovely memory.

I've recently gotten into birding as an adult, and have heard that in some parts of the world basic bird identification is part of the curriculum (e.g. the Netherlands). If you don't mind me asking, what country/region did you go to school in? Was this the initiative of one teacher, or something more standardized?

The UK. Not standardized, just a lucky combination of a fancy school trying to justify fees and good teachers who made the most of the situation for their students.

The Acorn was a rebadged Psion 3 rather than a precursor. I remember as I lusted after the Psions on display in Boots as a (dorky) child, and was ecstatic when our school piloted the Acorns.

(Psion and Acorn, two more examples of how the UK is capable of developing world-leading tech but not at successfully marketing it...)

Wow! I stand corrected. I was led to believe that Acorn went bust and sold to Psion. I thought it went Acorn Pocket Book 1, Acorn Pocket Book II, Psion 3.

Live and learn. Thanks! :-)

Can confirm, as my first Psion was the Paion II, a calculator formfactor device with full keyboard and OPL programming language.

My later Psion 5 ended up spending most of its time running a zx spectrum emulator - go figure :-)

Good heavens no.

Psion did the software bundled with the Sinclair 16K/48K ZX Spectrum that was bundled at launch. It also wrote the bundled apps for the Sinclair QL.

Then it did its own line of pocket computers: the Organizer, the unsuccessful MC solid-state laptops, which it then miniaturised into the very successful Series 3, 3A, 3C and 3MX.

Acorn licensed these and sold them with changed software in the ROM, with an schools/educational focus instead of PDA functions.

Psion followed on with the Psion 5, using Acorn's ARM processors and a whole new OS, EPOC32.

That evolved into Symbian and powered the 1st mass-market smartphones. It's now FOSS.

Acorn made it big because it designed the first mass-market RISC chip, the ARM.

Acorn spin-off Arm is alive and well and the Arm chips are the most widely-used CPUs in the world, with about 10x-100x as many sold every year as all x86 put together.

Psion, sadly, is no more.

> an Acorn Pocket Book

A rebadged Psion Series 3.

https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Pocket...

256 kB RAM.

Psion 3:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3#Psion_Series_3

Important note: the pic at the top of the Wikipedia article shows the later, improved 3A with a much bigger screen.

> the additional memory of the Psion 2

I do not understand this. The APB was a Psion (Series) 3. The Psion 2 (Organizer II) was an older, smaller device.

The S3 and APB take memory cards: 2 slots onboard, for Psion SSDs (NOT the modern usage of the term "SSD". See:

https://pulster.de/Psion-Solid-State-Disk-SSD-memory-cards

The Psion 3A had more memory. The 3C more still, and the 3MX more still.

When you say "Psion 2" do you mean Acorn Pocket Book 2?

http://superdecade.blogspot.com/2017/12/acorn-pocket-book-ii...

That was a rebadged 3A, so with from 256kB to 1MB RAM as stock.

Psion did a 2MB model, but Acorn didn't.

As an owner of a 3 and 3A, the 3A was the usable version. The 3's screen was too small, and its storage meagre (but expandable, and I did.)

The 3A was 2x the speed, a much bigger screen with better contrast (but no backlight) and versions with up to 2MB were available, which for this class of machine was a vast amount of storage you'd never fill. Thing 2TB for comparison now, plus 2 drive bays for more if you need it. A laptop with 6TB? That is plenty for almost anyone.

I've never had a Psion, but as I've become a dad, I've wished for devices for digital literacy that weren't tablets or phones. Something dumb with a dictionary, encyclopedia, calendar, an editor, and a few games, and physical keyboard is a great, safe introduction to the digital world.

100% this as father of 6 and 4 year old. I still remember fairly vividly when my dad, an engineer, can from work one day and showed me the 3a, blew his and my mind especially. Not many tech devices have done that since.

You should check out uConsole [1] from ClockworkPI. It still has WiFi, but you can probably disable it.

[1] https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/uconsole-kit-rpi-cm...

It’s a Linux system. You can definitely disable anything you want.

(The current question is whether the uConsole ever ship)

This device seems too good to be true. Have they shipped any?

There is a whole forum thread about that [1] with updates from the devs, but I don't think anybody received theirs yet.

[1]: https://forum.clockworkpi.com/t/update-uconsole-shipping-rel...

Try an Android e-ink tablet like a Boox Note. They have wifi, but it's mostly for file sync and stuff because web browsing on e-ink is bad enough to not be worthwhile.

I would like this for my daughter as well. She’s way to interested in my iPhone and handing her a keyboard disconnected from a computer is only interesting for a few minutes

I realized I had no idea what actual platform these were (I'm old enough to remember longing for one of these but never had one back in the day).

It's powered by the NEV V20 [1] processor, which is a 16-bit chip that is code and pin compatible with the more famous Intel 8088. The NEC chip was launched in March of 1984 which is interesting given that the Psion 3a came in 1991.

It feels like today launching a product based on a 7-year old CPU is more rare.

It would be cool (but perhaps sacrilegious) to upgrade the existing motherboard to some Arm SoC/microcontroller, if possible. I thought of it now while writing this, so clearly someone has already done so.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

> It feels like today launching a product based on a 7-year old CPU is more rare.

Well. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 has an ARM Cortex-A53 SoC. The Zero 2 was released in October 2021, and the A53 line in October 2012. I don't think you'd struggle to find other A53 devices being released after 2019.

It almost feels like the A53 line is a bit of a special case, but then again, so was the 8088...

Good point, thanks! I guess the RPi's special relationship with Broadcom is shining through a bit there, or something.

The operating system was called SIBO, which rather unimaginatively stood for SIixteen Bit Operating system.

It is a direct ancestor of EPOC, which in turn was later renamed to "Symbian", as made popular on many Nokia devices.

I checked after posting and I was partly wrong! Sorry!

The Psion Series 3 range -- 3, 3A, 3C and 3MX -- ran SIBO, later renamed EPOC, later renamed EPOC16, a multitasking GUI OS written for 8086.

SIBO = SIxteen Bit Organizer. Not OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser#Subsequent_han...

The Psion 5 range ran the later and largely unrelated EPOC32, a native ARM OS written in C++ which later became Symbian.

But SIBO did not become Symbian. EPOC 5, later EPOS32, did.

There was even more renaming than I realised.

NEC V20 was also in one of my favorite palmtops, HP 95LX also from 1991. Later models switched to custom chip afaik.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_95LX

I dabbled in handhelds in that era, and always wanted a Psion but never got around to it.

The main issues in that era for me were that they devices were dead ends for data. At the time, the main competitor for something like this was a paper planner, of course, which are ALSO dead ends, so it was a reasonable approach.

Newton happened, though, and initially -- and people forget this -- it came with the Newton Desktop, which gave you access to your data on Windows. It synced! This was huge!

And then, for reasons I've never understood, Apple dropped the Newton Desktop with the rev to NewtOS 2.0, which was really really great otherwise. Unfortunately easy desktop sync turned out to be a killer app in this space, because Palm came to market with that as their foundation and ruled the whole market for quite a while.

I loved the Newton -- and if you've never touched one, you don't actually know how useful they were; it was really pretty amazing -- but the sync was what pushed me to Palm, where I stayed until the 2000s.

I played with some of those PDAs as a kid, and honestly I never really got what they were used for. There was no Wi-Fi and internet connection via infrared was not really awesome. Using it while traveling abroad was extremely expensive.

You were able to sync the email from your desktop PC, answer them offline and send them on the next sync.

And you could do spreadsheets. But honestly, who really uses spreadsheets on their smartphone? (Which is a comparable user experience)

So the only thing left is calendar, contacts and notes. A paper planner was probably more useful back then.

That's the rub. They're from a world that was, in very meaningful ways, "pre-connectivity."

Doing meaningful work on a portable presupposes the ability to continue that work when you're at a better device. We have that NOW, but 20-25 years ago we really didn't.

People today talk about how bad handwriting rec was the death of the Newton, but it really wasn't. The HWR was pretty stellar under 2.0, even with my objectively terrible penmanship. What killed it was (a) its price and (b) its lack of connectivity to the desktop.

Palm entered the market with a $299 device that was dead cheap, fit in your pocket, and synced with either the Palm Desktop or Outlook. That's what killed the Newton.

Related, more or less:

Getting a Psion 5 palmtop from 1997 online via PPP (and a Raspberry Pi) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33946824 - Dec 2022 (26 comments)

“16 Shades of Grey” – Building a Psion/EPOC32 Emulator (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30835970 - March 2022 (1 comment)

Psion PDA – How does it look today? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871609 - Jan 2022 (2 comments)

Raspberry Pi Helps Vintage Psion Find Its Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20609493 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)

Former Psion designers return with a fresh take on the PDA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619449 - March 2018 (2 comments)

Gemini PDA: 20 years on, meet the all-new Psion Series 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15818324 - Nov 2017 (69 comments)

Motorola Buys Psion For $200m - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126441 - June 2012 (1 comment)

Psion: the last computer (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226305 - June 2008 (1 comment)

The Psion 3C was the device I learned programming on. My father upgraded to a Psion 5 and I got his 3C. It was small enough that it could be hidden under the pillow/blanket when my parents came in to make sure I was sleeping, and then I could spend long nights writing text-based adventure games or calculators or whatever.

It is a pity that with all the interesting devices that have been left without updates, manufacturers do not release firmwares in a more organised way so that they can be used again, even if only in a limited way. I'm talking about devices such as the Vadem Clio, Nokia 770, blackberry playbook, several minipcs with windowsce, etc...

I imagine it's such a small niche that it's not worth spending time developing and adapting.

Certain classic computers powered by “AA” batteries are amazing to use today. I have an Alphasmart Dana set up for my children to play chess, do word procession, and learn to program in C. It is much better than dealing with the potential hazards of a modern device.

Theres a c compiler?? Can you share a link?

The Dana runs PalmOS 4 (the closest thing that ever existed to a Palm laptop), so any Palm-compatible C compiler will do.

Yes, the compiler is available here: https://palmdb.net/app/PocketC-Compiler And an editor is available here: https://palmdb.net/app/editc

What did you do to make your children happy with a LCD screen, chess, word processing and programming in C? :-)

Basically, getting rid of dopamine-driven entertainment has been the key. Going back to the 90s with pocket versions of games like Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego has been helpful. Board games, card games, lots of books, antenna TV, and DVDs for entertainment has made a big difference!

I used to be a heavy user of my Psion Revo back in the 2000s. It had a highly usable full-featured office suite, and I truly used it as a laptop replacement at the time. I was able to touch-type my university course on it, and it could even fit a shirt front pocket. Honestly, the only thing that quickly made it obsolete was the lack of network connectivity (limited to infrared). It's still one of the computing devices for which I have the fondest memories.

If I'd had better connectivity for my 5mx at the time, I don't think I'd ever have put it down. Phenomenal piece of kit. I don't even remember it being that expensive.

I loved my Psions.

I truly miss having a smaller form factor computer. If I could possibly an iPhone with an attached physical keyboard, I’m certain that I could do a huge amount of work that I presently do with my laptop. (I know I can get an external keyboard but there’s something far more useful and satisfying about a properly integrated device.)

The Era of the PDA was completely different and IMHO superior era to today's hyperconnected smartphones.

Yes, today's iPhones and Android devices do much much more, but the devices of older days were much more polished, to the point and streamlined.

iPhone is a great evolution of Palm hardware and design philosophy, but the gamification kills most applications, and oh, the notifications too. Glad that most of the useless notifications are turned off, so I can get some battery life and my attention back.

I completely agree. I’ve done quite a bit to get my phone experience to a useful level but it’s required a level of customization and careful use to create an experience that simply existed properly, out of the box, with the purposeful PDA operating systems of the 90s.

There do exist things like the Gemini and the Astro Slide, which I've always looked at as a potential replacement, but they always seem to just miss the mark. The closest I've come to the same sort of experience was the Nokia N900, which was remarkable in a lot of ways.

I'm still waiting for delivery on the Astro Slide after ordering it over a year ago. As it was on IndieGogo, I can't even get my money back.

Probably best to avoid Planet Computers - they lie about availability and delivery dates.

My contribution for Astro Slide is dated Oct. 2020. They've locked my contribution, so I consider it money burnt. While I was still naively waiting for it to come, I held on to my Gemini PDA for so long, even after its battery had bulged to the point that the back panel covering it had dislodged. After all the troubles it had caused me, I decided to give it up and get a normal smartphone instead. Life has been much better since then.

Same date here, but I don't even think they locked mine. I did give up too, but not on physical keyboard phones. I bought a unihertz titan pocket and I love it.

Keyboard is great despite the top row that is really weird coming from blackberry (but I guess it's because of B patents..). Form factor is weird but I actually like having a small phone, and it's ok for most of my use cases.

I see the Astro Slide 5G is 'NEW - JUST LAUNCHED! PRE-ORDER NOW TO SECURE YOUR PLACE IN THE ORDER LIST!' '£982.80 inc VAT' 'STOCK EXP. JULY 2023'

IANAL, but one might be interested in talking to the class of people who didn't get their purchased product from a company that is apparently mere weeks away from shipping the next revision of it.

The Nokia N950, which only made to a development edition, was much better. Unfortunately, mine met with a watery end.

I have a Gemini. The keyboard - you know, the main selling point - as often as not just goes 'thud' when you try to press a key rather than depressing and registering. The software was abandoned in a half-assed state after one revision. They strung me along for a good 6 months on shipping the USB-C hub and case post-Gemini delivery until I finally told them I was willing to give up on one of the two if they'd just send the other, at which point they magically and suddenly had both and shipped both. The USB-C dock-hub arrived non-functional and with something rattling around inside. It was some cheap AliExpress-grade crap anyway, so I dumped it, but those were early days for USB-C docks so I didn't know at the time. I declined to invest in a camera. I used it to edit a CV once on a plane to London. I did get the job. I guess that was worth the price of admission. It's no Psion, though!

I still have my Gemini and use it regularly. Its keyboard is not merely fine but as good as money can buy from any vendor in the 21st century.

This, for example, was entirely written on my Gemini:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/05/rust_kernel_pull_requ...

My Planet hub is in frequent use and, for example, was used in the creation of all 3 of these articles:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/10/thinkpad_x1c_g10_linu...

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/lenovo_thinkpad_x13s_...

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/23/lenovo_thinkpad_z13/

None would have happened without it, in fact.

When I wrote to Planet complaining that my keys so frequently rotated in their sockets that they would often entirely fail to depress, their response was that I should wiggle them a bit.

I'm glad you like yours. I don't. Disappointment from delayed beginning to ignominious end.

I do wonder at such wildly divergent experiences.

It was a fairly small production run, I am reasonably confident, so it seems very odd that some units should be well made with no major flaws, and others apparently awfully shoddy.

Ah well. Sorry you had a bad time. I love mine and am considering buying a 2nd to try Sailfish on, and maybe a spare, too.

I had a Psion 5, an amazing device. It had the same apps as the 3, if I remember correctly. The keyboard was astoundingly good. The keys, if larger, would make an excellent normal keyboard.

What I really loved about the 5 was that it could run Java. I think it never got past JDK 1.0.2, or maybe 1.1. But it was clunky to use. I wrote a little shell for it, which provided basic functionality, including much simpler compiling and execution of java code. (http://geophile.com/jshell. It should still run, except that it relies on an obsolete parser.)

You do not remember correctly, I'm afraid.

The 5 ran a whole new OS with all new apps. No backwards compatibility whatsoever.

Sure, but it was the same categories, Calendar, for example.

Um. Well, yes, broadly, true, but then they are largely similar across most PDA type devices. Address book or more general database, calendar/agenda/scheduler, notepad or jotter, maybe a file manager, then often some kind of minimal office-productivity tools or viewers...

I still think there's room for a device like this in real practical use.

Not for it's original application, no way would I want to give up modern software, but in embedded controls, something that gives you the full power of being able to do "Apps", while being cheap and small enough to have real dedicated devices.

Devices like this could be made insanely cheaply now, seeing as how $3 ESP32 type chips have more power. And the battery life would likely be measured in years today, since we wouldn't be using them to replace phones, we'd be using them to control our sprinklers and smart home devices, as calculators, etc.

We reached the good enough point for these so incredibly long ago, and the applications are so simple, plus there's no need for them to ever be directly exposed to the internet except on private WiFi.... they probably wouldn't need updates, at least not of the type an app would notice (They might need Bluetooth protocol updates).

It could also pair with a real phone and serve as a single-function interface device, a physical "app" for making phone calls, checking the weather, playing GB emulator games, etc.

At this point, anything that has a display and microcontroller could jump to PDA level capability for a few bucks more, and all these "Smart devices" would never go obsolete due to cloud crap again, you'd just install a new app.

Right now I think M5Stack is the closest thing, but it's not that popular outside of DIY, and there's no ecosystem around it.

I would be interested in a product or kit based on e-ink and a small keyboard.

It need not necessarily run EPOC16, though a battery-optimised OS would be quite useful.

I'm using a 13" e-ink tablet for most of my mobile use (reading, no social media, absolute minimal number of account-based tools), and it's quite good. A bit large for a pocketable / PDA device, and the fact that there's no keyboard which could integrate into a folding-but-usable case as I'd had for an earlier Android tablet[1] is disappointing. Apple likewise.[2]

I'm not looking for a phone (though with a headphone jack, the device might serve for vox comms), but a device on which I can read and create text and some images.

E-ink is battery-friendly, highly readable, works well for greyscale graphics (I often, though not always, forget that I'm looking at content which presumes colour), is highly readable under direct sunlight, and can be read in low-light conditions with a modest frontlight.

Purism and Pine may deliver here, though I'm not holding my breath.

Keyboard is essential to writing. Touch input sucks.

________________________________

Notes:

1. The keyboard itself was ultimately a disappointment, as was the tablet. The form-factor and ease of flipping from touch-based to keyboard-based use was quite appealing. More: <https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/lqgtwy_rhsfbdh5cdxb1rq>

2. The two problems are iOS's lack of a Linux-like userland, and yes, I'm aware of ish, and the fact that despite some otherwise delicious keyboards, keys critical to Linux/Unix tools and conventions are missing, most notably <esc>. Android/Termux remains superior, despite my many reservations against Android.

Beepberry https://beepberry.sqfmi.com/

Thanks!

(I was pretty sure there was a RaPi option somewhere.)

My dad had one of these and he continued to use it until the day he died in 2013. I remember thinking how crazy high resolution the screen was at the time. Amazing device.

I got his old Series 3 (predecessor to the 3a) when I was still a kid and was one of the first devices I learned to code on thanks to the built-in OPL programming language!

I had a 3a and found it more convenient to use than the heavy/bulky laptops of the day. My use cases were diary management, expenses, task tracking/todo, and short emails (via the add-on modem/mobile phone cable). The message app also allowed you to send SMS. The batteries seemed to last forever and being a standard size were available everywhere.

I dont know if a "new psion" would sell in sufficient numbers. It's a device I find myself wondering about (along with a chocolate-bar sized version of the iphone (Nokia 6300 size)). I'd buy one of those for sure, for when I'm not working and need a phone, but dont want the full "slab" to carry around with me.

I had a series V, I much preferred the keyboard. 2x AA batteries to power it.

I remember connecting to the internet via IRDA to my nokia 6210 around 2000, it was an amazing glimpse of the future

I always thought the Psion 3's keyboard was much better to type on than the Psion 5. Even though the 5's looked cooler, the keys had less feel and were heavier to press, and often would get stuck when pushing them not in the center.

I could type much faster on the 3's keyboard. The software was just way better on the 5 and the touchscreen was very useful.

The 3 had a much much better screen contrast though. I missed the backlight on my 3c but I think the 3mx did have this.

I still have a 5MX, modded it somehere around 2009 with bluetooth.

I still dream of an rLCD + Apollo 3+ chip + BLE (it has that) + WIFI + optional 4/5g + Psion like casing. I would write a graphical OS for it for fun. I really want to see week+ long battery life.

A humble plug: the stealth mode startup where I work at is cranking away at something similar. If you are intrigued, drop me a note at the email on my profile. Very happy to sign up folks on our email list!

This reminds me of when I was in primary school in 1996 or so, and the "thing" to have as a kid was a personal organiser; irrespective of the fact none of us had anything to organize.

"Bought, shouted at, and sold" is a great descriptor for Windows Mobile. Never has a combination of such high quality hardware and absolutely dogshit software ever existed.

I still have my 3a sitting on a shelf in my work space. Still works fine too. I only had to fix the hinge at some point. I have the one with a full 1MB of RAM! I vaguely remember writing a program for it in OPL that would tell the time using beeps during the night when pressing a button so I didn't have to turn a light on to know what time it was. I kind of want to see if I can use it for anything now. I still have the serial cable for it too (somewhere, I think).

I kept all my old PDAs (and some that belonged to friends and family that were tossing them out). I have a box filled with my Casio BOSS, Palm Pilot, and several others. They aren't worth much (I just checked ebay and an original, working U.S. Robotics Palm Pilot 5000 is selling for $50), but they are such an interesting memento in the history of digital tools.

So, motivated by this article, I checked eBay, expecting to burn $20-30 to get one and found that these sell for around $100 (thank god, didn’t buy another device to add to my pile).

My question is: who buys these at that price and for what purpose? Collecting old devices? Using them? I don’t think buying these have the allure of retro computing, eg buying a Sinclair Spectrum.

I have a few PDAs of this type, bought ultra cheap at flea markets and such, Casio Cassiopeia 4MB A-11, Psion Series 5, Ericsson MC12... bought for under $5 each so those eBay prices are nuts... they all work and they all serve absolutely no purpose, but when you're a ~hoarder~ collector you can't help yourself.

I bet some people still use them. I used my Psion 5mx as my primary organizer until only a few years ago, and I still kind of miss it. It still works, but lacking any kind of connectivity except for infrared, it's increasingly difficult to justify in today's world.

For amusement value only -- a modern user:

https://srslyriskybiz.substack.com/p/putins-chef-cooks-up-in...

When I was younger I was desperate for one of these-it looked like some sort of hacking machine. No idea what I would have used it for.

I loved my 3a - which followed my Nokia communicator, which replaced my cassiopeia, none of which I actually really used lol... The 3a held the most promise with it's built in basic language... looking back I wish I had just enjoyed it more rather than being tied up in the illusion of the dot com boom. Thanks for the nostalgia!

It was far from an illusion.

I used to own a psion way back and also had a brush with the OS which morphed into Symbian on Nokia iirc. I loved the software architecture (which borrowed aspects from the B5000), APIs and "services" and overall the focus on robustness. Some aspects like threads having their own heaps contributed to the robustness.

I have gone through several Psion 5's over the last few years. They all broke eventually - mainly the screen (ribbon cable).

Because I couldn't justify spending yet another £60 for a Psion 5 which soon breaks down, I run Epoc Agenda now on my Windows PC on an EPOC emulator, and it's great for keeping track of events.

I'm currently writing an agenda app inspired by the Psion 3a/5 Agendas - because they were the best calendar apps I ever used.

Github: https://github.com/semiprime/pygenda Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvQqFmlZ6nM

If you liked the S5 agenda, I'd appreciate any feedback you could give. (Video shows it on a Gemini, but I also run it on my Linux Laptop. Running on Windows is probably possible, but I haven't tried it, so you'd need to do some fiddling - in particular installing GTK3).

this is pretty amazing - well done!

Hi, if you could get it working on Android, I'd be willing to pay $5.

Planet Computers already did an Android Agenda app for their range of handhelds: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pripla.gem...

(I've not used it. I've seen people complaining that it's not very good, but people always complain on the Web, so that's not much of an indicator of anything.)

I recently bought an Psion 5 off of ebay -- I've never had one before. The one thing I can't really get over is how awful the screen is -- the reviews online seem to indicate that mine isn't unique in this regard. Hard to see in anything but perfect lighting.

The keyboard is pretty good although not as good as I would have expected given the ravings about it.

I should probably open it up and re-enforce the cable but I'm a bit afraid of messing it up in the attempt.

27 years from now it will be 2050. Will todays smartphones still feel "wonderful"? I highly doubt it.

That’s true, and I would have liked the BlackBerry more if the pointer worked better and the software was better. That was the kicker for me. I do miss Graffiti – especially with all the trouble I have with the iPhone keyboard. It is a constant frustration, and it always has been

I worked at Psion during the Psion 3 era (and then later at Symbian). Hands down the best company I have ever worked for, and such an exciting time. Seeing the software one wrote in the hands of strangers in the street and on the shelves in Dixons was thrilling.

Gideon Gartner of Gartner research loved is Psion and as far as know never stopped using it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_Gartner

I wrote our entire heldesk documentation in college in a Psion 3A while on a bus tour.

Top notch. Miss physical keyboards, I feel like my parents and a VCR whenever I use my phone…

And on top of that, it's not contaminated with the usual dark patterns for monetizing, lock-in, control and surveillance that afflict today's devices.

But you’re not going to play this on your 286…

https://youtu.be/yCUppUOarpg

How long until there's a commercial product that has a built in LLM? Some device that is like a personal encyclopedia that you can ask about anything?

You could download wikipedia to even the cheapest of today’s devices. Forget the LLM and just add search.

https://github.com/mlc-ai/mlc-llm

I considered my hp100 and then hp200lx far superior devices!!

Does it run NetBSD?

Downvote? Seriously? It was a serious question. NetBSD runs everywhere, even 40 years old vaxen, so why wouldn’t it run on Psion?

It's an 8086. Well, an NEC V20.

No MMU = no Unix.

There doesn't seem to be a port for 16-bit CPUs. But maybe Linux in the form of ELKS if the memory allows.

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