(no subject)
Jun. 6th, 2019 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liam_on_linuxA friend on a vintage-computing mailing list mentioned his Fossil. Maybe the first working smartwatch, it was a tiny Palm PDA on your wrist -- but with no wireless comms.
It got me reminiscing about Psions.
Phone dialling was a built-in feature of the Psion range of PDAs. The address book app could dial any number in the address book, merely by holding it up to the phone mouthpiece.
It blew people's minds at the time (very early 1990s).
This wasn't a phone-dialling device or anything. It was a tiny pocket computer, but unlike something like an HP 95LX, it was a GUI machine with a diary, address book, word-processor, spreadsheet and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3
It wasn't the first "digital diary" of course, but it was the best. Ultimately a later, ARM version of the OS became the basis of Symbian.
But the fact that your pocket address book could dial the phone for you -- not by being a keypad or anything, just by picking it up, looking for Bob and pressing DIAL and then holding it near the phone -- was impressive for its time.
One of my favourite things to do with its successor model (the Series 5) was pull up an address entry, and when someone pulled out a Palm Pilot and starting trying to scribble Graffiti into it, to stop them and transmit the contact to them by IRDA. Most Palm owners had no idea that their devices spoke infra-red and for them to get a whole contact
instantly by wireless was deeply impressive to them.
I never had a Fossil. I was slightly tempted when they were being sold off cheap at the end of production, but I resisted. I was never a big fan of PalmOS, TBH. Too limited for me as a former Psion user, and the Palm devices were always very tied to a PC -- they were meant to be a way to take your Outlook (or whatever) address book and diary with you in your pocket. I didn't use Outlook or a desktop PC PIM at all. I used my Psions for that stuff. It multitasked with anything, had a better richer calendar app than any PC product ever written, was more reliable than any general-purpose desktop PC ever, and fit in my pocket and ran for a month on 2 AA cells.
I suspect that one of the things that contributed to Psion's downfall is that AFAIK they never really cracked the US market, which was dominated by weird expensive little gadgets that tried to be a tiny, hopelessly-compromised generic PC in a tiny form-factor -- things like, well, the OQO handheld WinXP PCs, but also the Poqet, the DIP Portfolio, the HP LX and Omnigo range, etc.
In the 1990s and indeed the first decade of the 2000s, it was, on the face of it, clear plain and obvious that you couldn't fit a generic PC clone that you'd actually want to use into your pocket, and if you compromised it so you could, it would be horrid: either it would have a battery life roughly as long as a hummingbird orgasm, or it would be a PC with the capabilities of a desktop from a decade or 2 earlier.
So, an early 1980s PC class machine in the 1990s -- HP LX etc. -- or a 1990s laptop in the noughties.
The result was, to my European eyes, a succession of overpriced, underspecified, clever but undesirable gadgets. And the response to that was the Palm range, which were just an accessory to a business PC.
I didn't want either.
The European solution was different. It said: "OK then, we can't fit the hardware to run a desktop OS into a pocket and deliver a good experience, so what we'll do is this: we'll fit the best hardware we can on a budget and with decent power consumption so it doesn't run out inconveniently fast, and we'll write bespoke software to run on it to deliver the functionality customers actually need."
The result was first, the Psions.
A little later, in the Nordic countries, the Nokia mobile phones.
Psion's first try, the MC laptops.
Neat hardware, clever OS, but decent PC laptops were coming. So they shrank it into the Psion Series 3 range.
I suspect many American readers have never seen or held one of these so these links might be worth a read.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/4020/Psion-Series-3/
https://stevelitchfield.com/historyofpsion.htm
The Series 3 had a small screen but an elegant multitasking GUI OS on an 8086. Optimised for keyboard operation, no touchscreen. Very rich PIM apps -- seriously, unsurpassed on any other platform. Rock-solid OS. Only connected to PCs for backing up.
The range gradually got bigger screens and more RAM over the next few years.
Then they realised they'd reached the end of the line fort the hardware, rewrote the OS in C++ for ARM and did the Psion 5 range. For comparison, see this Australian assessment versus the American machines.
When Psion saw that the writing was on the wall for PDAs without wireless comms, they formed Symbian, rewrote the OS to have a comms stack, and moved successfully into smartphones.
There were some missteps though. The OS was written in C++ before the language was really ready, and so it went its own, non-standard way.
(The same problem arguably afflicted Be and BeOS.)
There was no standard GUI for Symbian: they led each licensee do their own, with no source-code compatibility. That was a big mistake. As a result, there were several:
Symbian had some unique attributes. E.g. it was the *only* smartphone OS to offer good enough realtime for single-CPU phones, running the comms stack on the same CPU as the user-facing GUI. *EVERY* other vendor had to run a separate CPU for the networking and comms.
But in the end, the American version won out. The iPhone had a radically simpler UI, in a single stroke obliterating Symbian and after a few years Blackberry too.
The only survivor was Android.
Designed by Android Inc as an OS for digital cameras, acquired by Google and repurposed for a Blackberry clone.
And then they saw the iPhone, pivoted again and did a very successful iPhone knock-off, just as Windows was a successful Mac System knock-off... after the first few versions.
Result of the eventual convergence on the American model:
We have amazingly sophisticated, high-spec smartphones and tablets, but they have a battery life of a single day, replacing European phones that lasted a week and PDAs that lasted a month.
Why, no, I am not happy about that.
The European PDAs had excellent keyboards you could type on. My Psion 5MX paid for itself in the first weekend of ownership: on a long-distance coach with a fold-down table the size of an iPad, I wrote 2 articles, both of which I sold and which paid for the device.
My Nokia phones had physical keyboards and very smart software for fast text input.
Now? No keyboards at all.
No, I am not happy about that, either.
I could read the screens of my Psion and Nokia in bright sunshine. American-design ones are slowly edging back towards that, but it's still difficult. Daylight-readable screens have disappeared from the market.
I'm not happy about that, either.
My Psions and Nokias had bulletproof OSes that lasted for years without a single update, and yes, they were Internet-connected by the last few generations. They ran in a few tens of megabytes of nonvolatile storage.
Now, my tablet and iPhone and Android phones need at least 3 or 4 apps updating every day. If I don't use one for a few weeks, it's just like Windows -- I have to do half an hour of updates before I can use it. The OS needs to be replaced every month or two to fix all the flaws in it, and that's a gigabyte or so of storage.
I am furious about this.
"The JesusPhone, I swear it is smiling at me: Come to me. come to me and be saved. The luscious curves, the polished glissade of the icons in the multi-touch interface - whoever designed that thing is an intuitive illusionist, I realise fuzzily as my fingertip closes in on the screen: That's at least a class five glamour."
(Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum)
They're very shiny. They do a lot.
But I had a better phone and a better PDA 20 years ago. The whole is much less than the sum of its parts.
It got me reminiscing about Psions.
Phone dialling was a built-in feature of the Psion range of PDAs. The address book app could dial any number in the address book, merely by holding it up to the phone mouthpiece.
It blew people's minds at the time (very early 1990s).
This wasn't a phone-dialling device or anything. It was a tiny pocket computer, but unlike something like an HP 95LX, it was a GUI machine with a diary, address book, word-processor, spreadsheet and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3
It wasn't the first "digital diary" of course, but it was the best. Ultimately a later, ARM version of the OS became the basis of Symbian.
But the fact that your pocket address book could dial the phone for you -- not by being a keypad or anything, just by picking it up, looking for Bob and pressing DIAL and then holding it near the phone -- was impressive for its time.
One of my favourite things to do with its successor model (the Series 5) was pull up an address entry, and when someone pulled out a Palm Pilot and starting trying to scribble Graffiti into it, to stop them and transmit the contact to them by IRDA. Most Palm owners had no idea that their devices spoke infra-red and for them to get a whole contact
instantly by wireless was deeply impressive to them.
I never had a Fossil. I was slightly tempted when they were being sold off cheap at the end of production, but I resisted. I was never a big fan of PalmOS, TBH. Too limited for me as a former Psion user, and the Palm devices were always very tied to a PC -- they were meant to be a way to take your Outlook (or whatever) address book and diary with you in your pocket. I didn't use Outlook or a desktop PC PIM at all. I used my Psions for that stuff. It multitasked with anything, had a better richer calendar app than any PC product ever written, was more reliable than any general-purpose desktop PC ever, and fit in my pocket and ran for a month on 2 AA cells.
I suspect that one of the things that contributed to Psion's downfall is that AFAIK they never really cracked the US market, which was dominated by weird expensive little gadgets that tried to be a tiny, hopelessly-compromised generic PC in a tiny form-factor -- things like, well, the OQO handheld WinXP PCs, but also the Poqet, the DIP Portfolio, the HP LX and Omnigo range, etc.
In the 1990s and indeed the first decade of the 2000s, it was, on the face of it, clear plain and obvious that you couldn't fit a generic PC clone that you'd actually want to use into your pocket, and if you compromised it so you could, it would be horrid: either it would have a battery life roughly as long as a hummingbird orgasm, or it would be a PC with the capabilities of a desktop from a decade or 2 earlier.
So, an early 1980s PC class machine in the 1990s -- HP LX etc. -- or a 1990s laptop in the noughties.
The result was, to my European eyes, a succession of overpriced, underspecified, clever but undesirable gadgets. And the response to that was the Palm range, which were just an accessory to a business PC.
I didn't want either.
The European solution was different. It said: "OK then, we can't fit the hardware to run a desktop OS into a pocket and deliver a good experience, so what we'll do is this: we'll fit the best hardware we can on a budget and with decent power consumption so it doesn't run out inconveniently fast, and we'll write bespoke software to run on it to deliver the functionality customers actually need."
The result was first, the Psions.
A little later, in the Nordic countries, the Nokia mobile phones.
Psion's first try, the MC laptops.
Neat hardware, clever OS, but decent PC laptops were coming. So they shrank it into the Psion Series 3 range.
I suspect many American readers have never seen or held one of these so these links might be worth a read.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/4020/Psion-Series-3/
https://stevelitchfield.com/historyofpsion.htm
The Series 3 had a small screen but an elegant multitasking GUI OS on an 8086. Optimised for keyboard operation, no touchscreen. Very rich PIM apps -- seriously, unsurpassed on any other platform. Rock-solid OS. Only connected to PCs for backing up.
The range gradually got bigger screens and more RAM over the next few years.
Then they realised they'd reached the end of the line fort the hardware, rewrote the OS in C++ for ARM and did the Psion 5 range. For comparison, see this Australian assessment versus the American machines.
When Psion saw that the writing was on the wall for PDAs without wireless comms, they formed Symbian, rewrote the OS to have a comms stack, and moved successfully into smartphones.
There were some missteps though. The OS was written in C++ before the language was really ready, and so it went its own, non-standard way.
(The same problem arguably afflicted Be and BeOS.)
There was no standard GUI for Symbian: they led each licensee do their own, with no source-code compatibility. That was a big mistake. As a result, there were several:
- UIQ on Sony Ericsson devices
- Nokia Series 60 -- for candybar phones with a numeric keypad
- Nokia Series 80 -- a recreated Psion UI for the ill-fated 7700 series. That's what I bought.
- Nokia Series 80 -- for the QWERTY-equipped Communicators, somewhat inspired by Geos and the HP OmniGo
- MOAP by NTT DoCoMo -- Japanese market only
Symbian had some unique attributes. E.g. it was the *only* smartphone OS to offer good enough realtime for single-CPU phones, running the comms stack on the same CPU as the user-facing GUI. *EVERY* other vendor had to run a separate CPU for the networking and comms.
But in the end, the American version won out. The iPhone had a radically simpler UI, in a single stroke obliterating Symbian and after a few years Blackberry too.
The only survivor was Android.
Designed by Android Inc as an OS for digital cameras, acquired by Google and repurposed for a Blackberry clone.
And then they saw the iPhone, pivoted again and did a very successful iPhone knock-off, just as Windows was a successful Mac System knock-off... after the first few versions.
Result of the eventual convergence on the American model:
We have amazingly sophisticated, high-spec smartphones and tablets, but they have a battery life of a single day, replacing European phones that lasted a week and PDAs that lasted a month.
Why, no, I am not happy about that.
The European PDAs had excellent keyboards you could type on. My Psion 5MX paid for itself in the first weekend of ownership: on a long-distance coach with a fold-down table the size of an iPad, I wrote 2 articles, both of which I sold and which paid for the device.
My Nokia phones had physical keyboards and very smart software for fast text input.
Now? No keyboards at all.
No, I am not happy about that, either.
I could read the screens of my Psion and Nokia in bright sunshine. American-design ones are slowly edging back towards that, but it's still difficult. Daylight-readable screens have disappeared from the market.
I'm not happy about that, either.
My Psions and Nokias had bulletproof OSes that lasted for years without a single update, and yes, they were Internet-connected by the last few generations. They ran in a few tens of megabytes of nonvolatile storage.
Now, my tablet and iPhone and Android phones need at least 3 or 4 apps updating every day. If I don't use one for a few weeks, it's just like Windows -- I have to do half an hour of updates before I can use it. The OS needs to be replaced every month or two to fix all the flaws in it, and that's a gigabyte or so of storage.
I am furious about this.
"The JesusPhone, I swear it is smiling at me: Come to me. come to me and be saved. The luscious curves, the polished glissade of the icons in the multi-touch interface - whoever designed that thing is an intuitive illusionist, I realise fuzzily as my fingertip closes in on the screen: That's at least a class five glamour."
(Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum)
They're very shiny. They do a lot.
But I had a better phone and a better PDA 20 years ago. The whole is much less than the sum of its parts.
