A month or so back I gave in to temptation and snapped up a Psion Organiser II from eBay. I was able to find the LZ64 model, which was the last ‘slab’ Organiser Psion made before introducing the Series 3 clamshell design.
One of the difficulties of using retro tech these days is power. Back in the (pre-USB) day, every device had its own, specific power requirements: voltage, wattage and polarity of barrel connector. And big, chunky ‘wall warts’ to go with them. I’m using three old portable devices at the moment, and they all have different AC adaptors.
What is the best way to transfer information to and from a Psion Series 3 PDA these days? Of late I have shifted from DOSBox Staging to plptools. ‘PLP’, incidentally, stands for ‘Psion Link Protocol’.
I have written before about the Psion 5mx, a palmtop computer from the late 1990s, and I have grumbled about its LCD screen. I don’t have a problem with LCD per se — you can’t expect the same screen quality that you get with a modern colour OLED retina display — but in the right light conditions an LCD can be perfectly usable. However, the 5mx screen’s specific level of reflectivity narrows the range of lighting conditions under which it gives you a good, clear view.
What’s odd about this is that the 5mx’s predecessor but one, the 3a, has a really good LCD screen which provides a clear view over a wider range of lighting conditions.
Continue readingI was resisting buying a memory card for my Amstrad NC100, but in the end I caved in. It was mostly because I have memory cards for my two Psion devices — a proprietary flash drive for the Series 3a and a CompactFlash card for the Series 5mx — because it’s reassuring to know that you can quickly make safe copies of working docs on a device without storage.
This I couldn’t do on the NC100 because it’s rather more limited in the type of cards it supports. Basically, you’re talking 64KB to 1MB SRAM cards in the PCMCIA/PC Card form-factor only.
Continue readingHere’s a handy trick for any of you who, like me, have not only taken to retro computing in general but the Amstrad NC100 notepad in particular.
I was frequently being told that the machine’s back-up CR2032 coin cell was running low. This despite it being installed fresh out of the packet, and not long enough ago for me to expect such warnings.
Continue readingWhile browsing some scans of old, out-of-print books about the Amstrad NC100, I discovered that it has a built-in screenshot facility. I knew my various Psion devices could do this, but not the NC100.
The trick — press Control–Shift–S — was mentioned in Robin Nixon’s The Amstrad Advanced User Guide, published in 1993 by Sigma Press. The book contained BBC Basic and C utilities for converting the raw bitmap data generated by the keypress.
I immediately keyed in the C code to try it out. It did the job.
Typing in a listing! What an old-school feeling!
Continue readingOK, so it was one of those purchases you can’t help yourself from making. A random, unprompted visit to eBay and suddenly I was £170 down but up one Psion Series 5mx palmtop with all the trimmings. And in very good condition it all is too.
The Series 5 debuted in 1998 as the follow-up to the Series 3 family. I already have a 3a, the same model that I used for time a time back in the day. The 5 was a major upgrade: an ARM processor in place of an x86, more RAM of course, but crucially a backlit, touch-sensitive screen (plus device-dockable stylus) and a deck of larger, less calculator-like keys. In addition, out went the Series 3’s proprietary memory card format and in came a CompactFlash slot (though only one, not two as before). Psion also adopted a new serial comms port that negated the need for the Series 3’s 3Link ‘soap on a rope’ cable, which converted the 3’s proprietary bus to RS232.
Continue readingLast year, I performed some jiggery-pokery on my headless Raspberry Pi-based HomeLab to allow my veteran Psion 3a palmtop to be used as a serial terminal for those times when SSH-ing in was not an option. The age of the 3a meant it was a sub-optimal experience, but it was usable. I recently acquired a Psion 5mx, released half a decade after the 3, and put it to the same task.
The experience is much better, but I needed to tweak the PI-side settings to get results.
Continue readingWorking with old tech can take you to unexpected places and expose the quirks of modern coding systems. Case in point: old computers’ supported character sets and their impact on getting workable text when you transfer data across to a recent OS.
I came across this with my Psion Series 3a. I’ve been using it as a note-taking device while researching archive texts on the history of semiconductors. When I was done, I transferred the notes (a single Psion Word file) to a Mac and converted it using my Word2Text utility.
But the computer said, “No”.
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