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Psion3/a looking for more information, working links, forums, etc ?

A

anormal

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 18, 2010
Messages
103
Location
Canary Islands / Spain
Hi, a friend give to me an old (very good condition) Psion3 (don't know if is a), with a serial cable, some software card and i think what it is a modem.

So I spent some time in Google/Reddit, but only found dead links, I don't found anything interesting.

Any Psion fans here? Is there any site or forum working?, I'm looking for things as if it's possible to upgrade this beauty,
possibility of running software on it, or connecting to a modern machine, etc...

If anyone can give some help it would be great!

Thanks
 
The 3A has a bigger screen and a built in Spreadsheet which the original series 3 does not so should be easy to identify.

Never used them in their day but I do have a Series 5 (and a Psion Organiser II) in my collection. They were really quite amazing pieces of hardware for their time.

Psion sold a product called 'PsiWin' which bundled a serial cable and data transfer software to sync files between the Psion and a Windows PC. This was available for the series 3, 5 and 7 AFAIK.

The standard PsiWin software only works properly with older versions of Windows, it may well also require a hardware serial port rather than a USB adaptor.

You could get a parallel printer interface for it which would connect with most dot matrix, ink jet and laser printers of the time (don't think there was ever any USB solution though).

Dial up modems and web browsers were available too for internet access., but doubt there is any practical modern usage in these.

The series 5 does have a PC Emulator available. Only emulates an XT class machine with 512KB of RAM and CGA graphics (and also doesn't run at full speed of a real PC) but did manage to get a few DOS programs to run on it. Don't know if anything similar was available for the series 3.

Microsoft Autoroute was actually ported to the series 3 and for a while was often sold bundled with it to give you a complete set of maps for the whole country and route planning in a pocket sized device, in the mid-90's when A-Z's still ruled supreme. Many were bought just for this purpose. In the pre google maps, pre affordable GPS era this was about as close to mobile navigation as the average person could get.

I always think the biggest blunder Psion made was not releasing a colour screen version of the series 5. There was a series 7 with a colour screen but it was a much larger device and not pocketable. The series 5's upgrade (the 5mx) simply improved the monochrome screen by making it slightly higher contrast and providing a better backlight. This didn't really cut it any more in 1999.
 
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