Modems and external dialers.

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 22:57, Tomasz Rola via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> I share the sentiment and I guess I could give similar description
> (yours was very interesting, BTW).

Thank you!

> If I had a privilege to own
> Psion. But, when I went on for shopping, Psion was already bowing out
> of the PDA market. So I bought Compaq iPAQ 3630, installed Familiar
> Linux on it and hoped there would be a future when PDAs can be
> bought. Hoho, I was so wrong. But while researching, I could on one
> ocassion tap a bit on this excellent Psion 5mx keyboard in a shop. I
> think about this keyboard to this very day.

Nothing ever was better and fitted in your pocket. *Nothing*.

> About displays: my ideal display was the one from iPAQ (they were also
> used in other handheld PDAs of the time). It was called transflective
> LCD. They are easily recognized, because the light can be permamently
> turned off. "Normal" LCD has a backlight, i.e. a layer of
> leds/incandescents which shine through from the back of the display
> towards the user. Transflectives have special reflective layer in the
> back, and a diode on a side. The external light reflects and shines
> back through the crystal layer. Sorry for laymanish description, but I
> hope I have got it right.
>
> Anyway, such display looked best in full sun. The one in 3630 could
> display 4096 colors (with spectrum slightly bent towards pinky). Later
> iPAQ models could do 65k colors (again slightly bent, but this time
> much less visible). I used mine PDA as a proto ebook reader, lots of
> html and pdb material read outdoors. The same kind of LCD was to be
> found in many phones.

Fascinating. I did not know transreflective LCDs were in PDAs. I only
knew of them from the One Laptop Per Child project. There was an
attempt to "productize" them as Pixel Qi but it died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
> For whatever reason, morons decided the shiny LCD should be next best

> thing. And transflective got lost. Just like this. Nada. Appears like
> the very meaning of "mobile" changed during last twenty years - first
> it meant "outdoors" and now it means "from one couch to another,
> indoors".

A tragic loss for all of us. Triple-layer transmissive LCDs are a
terrible bodge of a technology, and it is only because they are so bad
that things like OLED look like good alternatives.

But since it is all that anyone knows now, we think they are great.

> Twenty years ago people using such tech were easily falling into
> "elite users" of some kind. Either because of earnings or because they
> had nontrivial needs and were decided to satisfy them - and the
> machines reflected this. Not so with todays users, and again, machines
> reflect this.

Yes, true.

> I am rather baffled whenever I read Psion had milion users and yet
> this was not enough for them. Plenty of people would consider
> themselves lucky if their books, cars or games were bought by this
> many. The attitude of Psion managers is totally disgusting for me,
> unless I had not taken something into account.

Agreed.

This is something  Planet Computers understands and I hope that it continues to.

> Perhaps niche technical products should be sold by those who
> understand niche markets. I imagine that if I came to manager of niche
> recording label and suggested he should get rid of musicians and start
> recording some generic crap outsourced from other side of the world to
> "reduce costs" I guess I would fly out the window with his boot in my
> arse. In contrast, I imagine that coming with similar proposition to
> manager of huge (so called) tech firm I would get a bl**job and some
> of his shares. But maybe I am romantic.

:-D Excellent comparison!


-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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