Modems and external dialers.

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 20:06, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> I don't think that my Fossil (Palm-OS WATCH) does IRDA.
> I should find somebody who will pay me money for such a piece of
> crap^H^H^H^H NEAT technology.

Good question. 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:

> NOTE:
> I consider the OQOs (XP or Linux in a pocket; need to sell off of a bunch
> of them), and the Fossil to be "Classic" even if they don't follow a
> 10-year/20-year/30-year guideline :-)

... like the OQO, 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.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=737&st=1

Neat hardware, clever OS, but decent PC laptops were coming. So they
shrank it into the Psion Series 3 range:

http://www.retroisle.com/others/psion/series3/general.php

I suspect many American readers have never seen or held one of these
so it 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:

https://thenewstack.io/retrocomputing-in-modern-times-rediscovering-the-psion-series-5mx/

An Australian assessment:

http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/m5palm.htm

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

Then later, realising this was a mess, they tried to reconcile them,
flailing around with a Qt abstraction later, buying TrollTech to do
it, and other efforts, but it was too little too late.

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:

https://www.androidauthority.com/history-android-os-name-789433/

... acquired by Google and repurposed for a Blackberry clone -- this:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-original-google-phone-presented-in-2006

https://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_prototype_revealed_during_google_oracle_trial.html

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.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
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