For what IT worths

My love of Psion handhelds started somewhere in 1998 when I first saw a Series 5. At that time it was one of the best of its kind. And it runs on 2xAA batteries, and runs for long. The screen remains readable on direct sunlight, and there’s the little alien green buzzlight for the night. And the keyboard. Full qwerty, small and sleek enough so that you can thumb-type while holding the machine in your hand. Instant on, so you just use it whenever you want, wherever you want. So in 1999 I’ve opened my wallet to buy a Psion 5mx.

Then I’ve found that the connectivity suite it comes with has linux support next to nil. No problem, you can’t have it all. And a simple search revealed two open source apps, plptools and psiconv, the former to communicate with the machine, the latter to convert file formats used by Epoc, the handhelds operating system created by Psion, to something less exotic.

At that time, psiconv had limited support for Psion documents. Being curious by nature, I wanted to know what’s buried behind those nice icons. I’ve spent countless hours deciphering the Sheet file format, armed only with a hexdump app, an ever evolving test parser, and lots of patience. All this turned out to be fruitful, as my findings became incorporated into both the documentation and the implementation of psiconv, which then was even used as an import plugin for gnumeric. I’m still wondering whether anyone has used it, though.

My affection was put to a long halt after my love of this machine broke with its screen cable. A design flaw all 5MX machines suffered is the wear-out of a small cable that connects their screen to the main board, which ages with every opening and closing of the machine. It usually lasts no longer than 2 years, mine wasn’t an exception either. I decided not to have it fixed for almost the price of a new PDA in 2001, and moved on to a different brand instead. Only later I realized how much I missed my old Psion. Fortunately, you can still get one for a very reasonable price on eBay. So I bought one again. And a Netbook, too. In fact, I’m writing this post on it. So now I’m happy again, even though I barely spend time using these machines, I wish I could.

Though these wonderful machines deserved a better fate, they are still thrive on the second hand market. As small as the population of Psion users who are also using linux was, psiconv never really gained too much attention, and only a handful of contributors cared to enhance it. Psion discontinued these wonderful machines, and the author of psiconv shows no interest in further development either. I guess, slowly I will acknowledge that time has passed over Psion PDAs, and put them on the shelf, next to my first beloved computer, the Commodore 64.