Using and Programming the Psion Organizer II: A Complete Guide

Product Information

The Series 3's innovative clamshell design did have some problems: breakages of any of the four hinges; loss of function in the button bar between the two halves of the clam; and deterioration of the cable linking the keyboard half to the screen, leading to a serious display problem with vertical lines appearing. I believe all Comms Links work with all Organiser IIs, except perhaps these early RS232 Links. If you have an LZ or LZ64 you might like to look for a later version of the Comms Link which can take advantage of the 4-line display. These can be identified easily as they have a little red LED in the corner, whereas the earlier 2-line Comms Links do not. Note that although Psi2Win does not provide any of the functionality of the MAKE.EXE and UNMAKE.EXE Be careful: you do not want a Psion 3Link, which was designed for the later Series 3, introduced in 1991. Nor do you want anything with the word 'parallel' in the name, unless you happen to be a vintage printer enthusiast! If your Comms Link looks like a Comms Link but has 'RS232 Link' written on it, you are looking at a very early 1986/87 model which might have more bugs and less functionality. Gartner Says Sales of Mobile Devices in Second Quarter of 2011 Grew 16.5 Percent Year-on-Year; Smartphone Sales Grew 74 Percent". Gartner. 11 August 2011. Archived from the original on 13 August 2011.

It turns out we also need to tell the organiser that we want to use the top slot rather than one of the other slots. I'm not sure if The use of each of these keys will be described in turn. Each of these keys is described overleaf. The ON/CLEAR key well, 'elegance' might be overdoing it a bit. With a mixture of skill, cunning and brute force (read: a vague plan and a pair of scissors) I have equipped my Raspberry Pi 3 with a 25-pin serial 'port'. Essentially I removed the old 9-pin female connector from the RS232/TTL converter I was using with a 25-pin male connector. This means that all the fiddling about poking wires into serial connectors is no longer necessary, as I can just plug the Comms Link into the Pi for lovely reliable 1200-baud communication :) will remember all information for many years, as they contain an EPROM chip, which can only be erased by exposing it to ultraviolet light The file should now be sent to the PC. If there is already a file of that name on the PC, you will be asked whether you want to overwrite it. Press Y if that is ok, but if not, you can press N for no and choose a different remote file name.

Hardware

The Psion Series 3 was the first truly useful personal digital assistant (PDA). Its purpose was to replace the old-fashioned paper agenda and Rolodex, but it could do much more. Besides the agenda with multiple views, it featured a database, a word processor, a spreadsheet with charts, world times, and more. series of commands which enable you to write programs as simple or sophisticated as you choose. By storing and saving programs in a In the 1980s and long before the arrival of smartphones, people’s lives were usually contained within a paper-based filofax diary. Jones, Marc Ambasna (23 April 1999). "Mobile Linux for Psion pressures Win CE". News. UK: ZDNet . Retrieved 17 June 2007.

The device itself had a hard plastic sliding cover protecting a 6×6 keyboard with letters arranged alphabetically. Screen-wise, you were blessed with a single-row monochrome LCD screen. Kewney, Guy (February 2004). "What Will Become the Next Scion of Psion?". eWeek. Ziff Davis Media. Archived from the original on 20 September 2004 . Retrieved 17 June 2007. in its BASIC-like language, and it totally abuses the CPU's bus design. But it's simple and it works. Psion was established in 1980 as a software house with a close relationship with Sinclair Research. The company developed games and other software for the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum home computers, released under the Sinclair/Psion brand. Psion's games for the ZX Spectrum included Chess, Chequered Flag, Flight Simulation and the Horace series. Psion Chess was later ported to other platforms, including the early Macintosh in 1984. [8] In 2003–4, Psion Teklogix and its founder David Potter expressed interest in Linux as the operating system for its devices as it divested from Symbian. [33] [34] [35] However, the only result of that interest was Linux as the operating system on a limited number of custom NetBook Pros designed for a hospital setting. [36]

The SIBO family, and the improved version of the OPL language (with window and focus controls), was replaced in 1997 by a new ARM architecture-based operating system EPOC32 written in C++; the latter was later sold as the Symbian operating system, which until 2010 was the most widely used OS in smartphones, being in 2011 displaced by Google's Android OS. [10] This change was more significant than appeared at the time. The consumer-grade high-level programming language still shares features with OPL, but the developer toolkits were from then on focused on programmers familiar with C and only the Symbian operating system remains. I initially got this to work on a breadboard, but built it up on a stripboard once I knew it worked: Software supplied on Datapak included a crude programming language named POPL, in which end-users could write their own programs. [3] Software Datapaks titled Science, Maths and Finance contained the POPL programming language editor, interpreter and runtime system and extended the built-in calculator by adding named functions. These Datapaks also contained different sets of application software written in the POPL language. There are four models of Organiser II - all should work with this project. I own two Organisers - a 1988-89 CM model and a 1987 XP model. The main loop reads a byte from the top slot. If the value is different to the last known value, then it reads again. If this second

The Hitachi 6301 processor is an enhanced development based on the Motorola 6801 implemented in complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor ( CMOS), with several extra instructions, various hardware system on a chip (SoC) facilities on-chip, power management and support for a sleep state. The particular variant chosen also had 4KB of masked ROM on-chip, so an external ROM was unneeded on the board. but couldn't find anywhere to buy the "CommsLink" module that connects it to a PC. I thought it sounded like a fun Arduino project, so In 1987, Psion launched the 'Comms Link' - a device that plugs into the Organiser at one end, and a 25-pin serial port on the other end. The Comms Link contains some on-board software for terminal emulation and file transfer, either via plain-text, XMODEM or Psion's own protocol. This allowed Organiser owners to connect their devices to their IBM-compatible PCs, or to modems etc. See that grey box with 'Comms Link' written on it? In there is a little chip which contains some terminal emulation/file-transfer software for the Psion, imaginatively called COMMS. If I connect the RS232 end to the Pi (via an RS232-to-TTL converter and possibly a 25-9 pin converter) and the other end to the Psion, I should be able to control a Pi terminal session using the Psion. Which is basically the aim of this project. The Organiser II was widely used for commercial applications in companies such as Marks & Spencer, where it was used on the shop floor, with their branding instead of Psion's and with only limited keys visible to the end user. It was also used in the world's first large-scale application of mobile technology in government, where over 3,000 were used for benefit calculations by the Employment Services department of the UK government. It proved popular with surveyors who interfaced it with electronic theodolites, which proved to be the precursor to the now popular total station.When all access of a particular file has been finished you have finished accessing a particular file, that file can be Partridge, Chris (8 July 2003). "Psion prepares the way for the one true OS". Computing. VU Net. Archived from the original on 30 September 2007 . Retrieved 17 June 2007. Organiser users can write their own programs with the 'Finance', 'Maths' or 'Science' paks, which provides the proprietary POPL Blessed with a long battery life, stable software, and durable hardware, these devices were relatively inexpensive (for the time) and proved popular. Kewney, Guy (9 February 2004). "Psion looks past Windows to Linux as Nokia buys Symbian". News Wireless. newswireless.net . Retrieved 17 June 2007.