I was indirectly introduced recently to the Pomera DM250, a Japanese ‘mobile typewriter’. I quite liked the look of it and, as a writer, its utility. It’s now being made available to a global audience officially rather than via eBay importers.
So the question is, can this NC100 survive Pomera’s arrival?
Continue readingIn the early 1990s, I got to play with a new Amstrad device: the NC100 “notepad computer”. At the time, Amstrad was the name in British computer manufacturing. Notably it had shifted more than a million of its PCW series of word processors and while at this point it was pushing its line of IBM-compatible PCs, it hadn’t forgotten the success it had had with word processing kit.
Enter the NC100, a mobile machine sporting a full size keyboard and a 480×60-pixel LCD used to render 80×8 characters. Pitched as a personal productivity tool, it shipped with on-board diary, calculator, address book, world time and spreadsheet applications as well as word processing software. Heck, it even included BBC Basic, in case you wanted to write your own programs on your daily commute.
Continue readingRecap I have acquired a UK-made Psion Series 3a palmtop. I’ve connected it to my Mac. I’ve connected it to my headless Pi server over serial. My next goal: connect the 3a to the Internet.
I never had any great expectations for getting the 3a online. To summarise the problem: the 3a shipped without integrated Internet support. And while it later received it, via the PsiMail email package, Internet access was predicated on a dial-up connection using a modem and an analogue phone line. It is possible to bridge this ancient approach to the modern world of always on broadband and WiFi, but yes, it’s a bit of PIA. Anyway, this is what you do.
Continue readingRecap I have acquired a UK-made Psion Series 3a palmtop. I’ve connected it to my Mac. My next goal is to connect the 3a to the Internet for email. But first… yes, I got distracted: having connected the 3a to a Mac, what about a Raspberry Pi? Could I do more with it than transfer files?
Darn right, I can. I can use it to control my headless server.
I have a soft spot for the technology of my younger days. In the mid-1990s, for example, I was in my late twenties and one of the machines I used for a time — all my MacWorld Boston 1994 coverage was written on one — was the Psion Series 3a. Pitched as a portable personal organiser, it was a palmtop PC running a 16-bit OS, SIBO aka EPOC 16, on an x86 CPU.
Running, I might add off a couple of AA batteries (with a coin cell to maintain RAM disk contents when the main pair were replaced) that could last for at least a month. No backlight on the monochrome LCD, though, which makes the device’s use in dim lighting tricky. Strong, over-the-shoulder lighting is essential.
Continue readingThis is a little project I’ve been working off and on now for some time. It’s one of those efforts where you do a heap of work and then leave it alone for months on end while you go off and do something else entirely. Eventually you come back and do a little more, and then something else distracts you. But you know you’ll complete it in the end, and the journey is as much fun as reaching the destination.
Almost all of the technology we use today is based on the microprocessor. There can be few electrical devices, really only the most basic, whose capabilities are not now defined by software running on a microprocessor chip within. Those chips’ designs are different, and some incorporate much more ancillary functionality than others, but their fundamental architecture is the same: a set of logic and arithmetical units operated in a predetermined sequence by a set of program instructions. The result: a general purpose machine that can be changed to do almost anything — you just keep feeding it different programs. Car engine management; central heating control; TV interface; games console; washing machine cycle… you name it, they use the same chips, just run different code.
In part one we saw how the young Clive Sinclair created Sinclair Radionics — twice — and built it into a successful business that launched hi-fi products in the 1960s and the first ever pocket calculator in 1972. In part two, we investigated the genesis of the Radionics microcomputer. Read on to learn what occurred when Radionics finally went under, and how the ZX80 came about…
In part one, we saw how the young Clive Sinclair created Sinclair Radionics — twice — and built it into a successful business that launched hi-fi products in the 1960s and the first ever pocket calculator in 1972, but soon suffered badly as its digital watch efforts foundered and competition crushed its calculator sales. Read on to learn how Radionics met its end, but (almost) gave birth to a new microcomputer…
Clive Sinclair formed the first company to bear his name in 1961 while he was a 21-year-old electronics journalist. He had received no formal education in the subject, but as a highly intelligent autodidact, he had developed a passion for electronics during his teens. He also had an entrepreneurial bent, and even in his youth spotted a business opportunity in designing and selling kits to fellow electronics enthusiasts.
