121–130 of 289 posts
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.
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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…
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
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 proc…
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
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.
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?
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> 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.
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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…
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.
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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…
>Android and hardware keyboards never really were a thing. The very first android phone (HTC dream) had a great keyboard.
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'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.