Psion Revo Plus
36 MHz EPOC release 5 palmtop
See also:
Status
BrokenSpecifications
- ARM 710T 36 MHz RISC CPU
- 155×79×17 mm clamshell case
- Touch-sensitive 4.75″ 480×160 4-bit greyscale display
- 53-key keyboard
- Psion EPOC release 5 operating system
- 16 MB RAM, 8 MB ROM
- 115 k baud connectivity via serial link and IrDA infra-red
- Rudimentary wave audio system (capable of MP3 playback) and mono speaker
Power packed into a little box
The real source of my pride in this machine is the level of sophistication achieved with the operating system. The following list is an incomplete summary of the capabilities of the machine:
- 32-bit operating system with protected-memory, multithreading and pre-emptive multitasking, renowned for stability, with features including:
- Object-oriented microkernel
- EIKON window server daemon with dynamic window layout, live window dragging and depth-based window shadow effects; the graphical interface is highly keyboard accessible as well as being operable by a pointer or stylus
- SQL relational DBMS daemon
- TCP/IP stack and PPP service for infra-red and serial
- Sound support adequate for MP3 (but not wave-mixed)
- Level-1 Object Linking and Embedding built atop a streams file content service
- Full long-filename-capable DOS-like file system with invisible ADFS-like association mechanism
- Printing support via infra-red and via a desktop computer over serial link with print preview
- Software suite, including but not limited to:
- WYSIWYG word processor with zoom, outlining, style gallery, and OLE support
- Reasonably sophisticated spreadsheet package with three-dimensional graphing and OLE support
- Agenda, contacts database, and mobile phone contacts synchroniser (via infra-red)
- Internet mail client with SMS support (to a mobile phone via infra-red)
- Alarm and world time clock with a variety of alarm sounds, large city database, custom location storage and location map and distance determination
- Styled-text jotter (also with OLE support, as a client only) and scientific/desktop calculator
- A copy of the Opera Web browser for EPOC came shipped on CD
All of the above (and plenty more unlisted features), fits into a single file-system-mapped MB ROM, and the MB RAM is shared between the kernel, running processes and the RAM drive. Having the distinct pleasure to own this device is what taught me that it is not necessary to involve the bloat we see today to achieve a worthy computer system. (That, and that closing unused programs is not necessary!)
Window shadows in EIKON
As pretty as window shadows in Mac OS X may look, there is something still somewhat fake about them: despite achieving Photoshop-style drop shadows in a GUI, the shadow depth itself has no bearing on the relative heights of windows on the screen, and shadows appear cast onto some invisible surface sitting just below each window. The real achievement of window shadows in EIKON (the standard EPOC GUI), is that the shadow depth at any point is based on how high the window casting the shadow is above the window on which the shadow is being cast. As EPOC normally runs in 2-bit greyscale, the darkness of the shadow does not vary, but the effect is rather attractive even so:
The only thing that would make it more impressive would be bump-mapped controls!