10 Facts About Psion Organiser

Psion Organiser was the brand name of a range of pocket computers developed by the British company Psion in the 1980s.

Psion Organiser II competed with the Filofax and can be considered the first usable electronic organizer or personal digital assistant in that it combined an electronic diary and searchable address database in a small, portable device.

Production of consumer hand-held devices by Psion Organiser has now ceased; the company, after corporate changes, now concentrates on hardware and software for industrial and commercial data-collection applications.

Whilst the Psion Organiser was highly praised as a device that pioneered portable computing, host Jon Bentley ultimately gave the accolade to the BlackBerry.

Psion Organiser approved of the consistent user interface across applications and reported that without documentation he was able to learn how to do everything except program in 15 minutes.

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The Psion Organiser I supported removable storage write once read many devices, which used erasable programmable read-only memory EPROM storage.

The Psion Forth Development System for the Organiser I was a powerful set of IBM PC-based cross-development tools for producing Forth application software, including a Forth compiler.

The Forth system on the Psion Organiser I had a compiler to intermediate code, interpreter and runtime, and had several unusual design features one being that it could interpret – that is, read and execute – Forth intermediate code directly in place on a Datapak, rather than needing to copy it into precious RAM first, despite the Datapaks not being execute-in-place memory-mapped.

In 1986, the successful Psion Organiser II introduced many hardware improvements, a better keyboard and display, a much larger ROM and either 8 KB, 16 or 32 KB, 32 or 64 KB of battery-backed RAM, and featured a capable newly designed single-tasking operating system.

Psion Organiser II had an external device slot, into which various plug-in modules could be fitted, including a device that provided an RS-232 port, thus enabling it to communicate with other devices or computers.