Modems and external dialers.

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 01:43:40PM +0200, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> 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.
> 
[...]
> 
> 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.

I share the sentiment and I guess I could give similar description
(yours was very interesting, BTW).  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.

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.

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".

> "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.

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.

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.

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.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **