Psion Organiser

The Psion Organiser was the brand name of a range of pocket computers developed by the British company Psion in the 1980s. The Organiser I (launched in 1984) and Organiser II (launched in 1986) had a characteristic hard plastic sliding cover protecting a 6×6 keyboard with letters arranged alphabetically.

The Organiser II can be considered the first usable PDA in that it combined an electronic diary and searchable address database in a small, portable device.

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

On an episode of The Gadget Show (first aired on 30 March 2009), the Psion was pitted against the BlackBerry for a place on the show's Hall of Fame. Whilst the Psion was highly praised as a device that pioneered portable computing, the accolade was ultimately given (by host Jon Bentley) to the BlackBerry.

Launched in 1984, the Psion Organiser was the "world's first practical pocket computer". Based on an 8-bit Hitachi 6301-family processor, running at 0.9 MHz, with 4 kB of ROM and 2 kB of static RAM and had a single-row monochrome LCD screen. The size with the case closed is 142 × 78 × 29.3 mm, and the mass is 225 grams.

BYTE's reviewer described the Organiser's software as a "clever design ... for fast and foolproof use". He approved of the consistent user interface across applications and reported that without documentation he was able to figure out how to do everything except program in 15 minutes. The machine provided a simple flat-file database, calculator and clock, and had no operating system. The Organiser I supported removable storage write-once devices, which used EPROM storage. The machine could host two of these so-called DATAPAKs (or simply PAKs), to which it could write data, but which needed to be removed from the machine and erased by being exposed to ultraviolet light before they could be re-used. As Psion had patented the use of EPROMS as storage device, it was impossible for other device manufacturers to copy this unusual approach to mobile storage.

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