But you’re not going to play this on your 286…
27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
241–250 of 289 posts
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#242I 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…
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…
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.
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#243I 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…
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Planet Computers? https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/
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,…
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.
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#245I 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.)
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 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!
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
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.
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, but what if you had a text based implementation of cyberpunk? Where your imagination is the GPU (the best one there is)
You mean like A Mind Forever Voyaging?
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#249Lots 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.
> What has vanished, is our ability to do general-purpose computing at ~8MHz. ahem https://xkcd.com/768/
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.
Re: 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 fideli…
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 th…
> 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...