Psion Organiser
The Psion Organiser was the brand name of a range of personal digital assistants developed by the British company Psion from 1984. Early Psion Organisers, the first version and the Organiser II, had a characteristic hard plastic sliding cover protecting a 6x6 keyboard with letters arranged alphabetically. The first Organiser provided a simple flatfile database and clock, and had a single row monochrome LCD screen. The Organiser II, originally introduced with an 8k battery-backed RAM, added some more application functionality, including progamability in the form of the Organiser Programming Language (OPL), a BASIC-like language which provided means to introduce machine code to the microprocessor. It had removable EPROM storage; the model could host two EPROMs each storing between 8k and 128k of data. These so-called PAKS had to be exposed to UV light for formatting. Later also flashpaks (EEPROM) and RAMpaks were used for storing upto 256k on each extension slot. Versions in the II range doubled and then doubled again the screen capacity to a giddy 4 lines, and also the internal memory was multiplied upto 96k.
The II also had an RS232 port enabling it to be used in conjunction with external datafeeds, and to be synchronised with external computers. Early Psions are very robust indeed; and they have been sold in very large numbers (about a million). Some continue to be used commercially, albeit the firmware of the two-line models fails to acknowledge dates after the end of 1999! Later organisers, such as the Organiser 3 and 5 were of a clamshell design with a QWERTY keyboard, and featured applications with Microsoft Excel and MS-Word compatibility. Production of Organisers by Psion has ceased; the company, after corporate changes, now interests itself on the hardware side to industrial and commercial data collection applications.
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