Psion

 

Moleskine Notebook, Psion II & Psion Series 5MX

 

The Psion Organiser was a British-designed and made device that was the vanguard in the relatively brief history of that singular device, the PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] and was in it's earliest incarnation the electronic upstart that threatened to knock the Filofax™ off it's perch as the yuppie weapon of choice in the late eighties.

To anyone under fifty, this last paragraph will contain many alien words and concepts. Whatever. This is about a British company that came up with some truly innovative kit over a period of years, starting up in 1980 and producing it's first Organiser in 1984, the year that saw Apple Computer produce the first Macintosh computers. The version of the Organiser that really took off was version two, issued in 1986 at the height of the yuppie era (ask your grandad) and was the go to device for techies wanting to get ahead of the Filofax™ game (again ask the old man). The photo above shows a variant of an Organiser II underneath the more recent model: the Series 5MX, this one bought off eBay some time ago out of nostalgia, the same reason I bought the old Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter a couple of years back.

These days I would baulk at typing very much at all on a mechanical, for two reasons. One, the strain on the fingers and arms would be a step too far and two, posting stuff on this blog would be a supreme pain to do. However, I am looking into older technology to write with; more focussed than the experience of using a laptop, with its endless interruptions, notifications and sundry bleeps and warnings, that just get in the way of writing.

I'm looking into ways of transferring text files from the Psion to the MacBook to edit, polish and post from, the basic content having been written on the MX, which has a very usable keyboard, given the pocket-sized nature of the device. This thing doesn't have any kind of modern interfacing, so I'm going with an SD to Compact Flash adaptor - a bit of a faff, but not so bad - I only do the same thing with the cards from cameras anyway. I'm also going to try a slightly larger device, also a very cheap eBay find, an AlphaSmart 3000, even more focussed: it is what used to be called 'A Word Processor'; that's how focussed it is, doing practically bugger-all else; but it does have USB, so getting stuff onto the Mac for finishing will be a doddle by comparison to the MX. I see the Psion as a distraction-free tool for writing on the fly and the AlphaSmart as a desk device with the same focus of purpose.

I'll post my findings on both devices as I get some results out of them. I'll be adding them to the Zettelkasten paper trail, too: extending  the Computers thread, naturally; although I see them as more analogue than digital in the way they will be used, so they'll link in with the typewriter and the Filofax™ in the appropriate threads to boot.