14 Dec 2013, 00:22
Serial data transfer … backing up my Revo's 16 MB RAM at 112 (?) kbaud took forever, and usually failed as the shell kept your Agenda file open, and the backup would go belly up at that point. It took me a long time to figure out why I could never back the stupid thing up … On the other hand, I could mount it as a volume on my Mac. (There was a simple setting that resolved it, though.)
Why barking mad? If a British company can produce that sort of equipment, how can a US giant like IBM have polluted and poisoned the industry with the IBM PC? They had all the money, yet produced garbage for it (same story with BBC BASIC vs Microsoft BASIC, the latter being some sort of appalling joke by 1982). The keyboard was the only thing it had going for it!
Don't forget that EPOC32's biggest rival was Palm OS, and US Robotics just used an existing OS and either chose not to licence the multitasking features, or were refused. I thought the Palm V was really pretty, but after trying a Palm III in a shop I started getting a really bad feeling about the OS. Many programmers were too lazy to save their state on exit, so you'd be back to square one if you needed to swap task, losing where you were in the program. Even the iPhone failed to multitask for years …
If you have to be barking mad to make an OS that actually doesn't suck rocks, so be it.
The other down side to the Revo was that you lacked the OPL IDE as standard (you had to download it, ditto the paint program), whereas with most other models you could write software straight out of the box. The only time I ever saw an Organiser II, the first and only thing I did was write a program on it, straight away, having never seen or used OPL before. Psion were the last bastion of an age when computers were designed to be programmed directly from new, and that concept died out when they pulled out of the handheld market. The Raspberry Pi misses the point so badly it's painful — the Model A/Model B naming is clutching at straws compared to its namesake machine, which was one UHF lead and one on/off switch away from a BASIC prompt.
