Hi Guys,
What do you think of my decision to change my channel a bit:
Instead of "HP Palmtop Tube", it will be from now on called "Palmtop Tube",
and my website will be: www.palmtoptube.com, perfect matched domain name
I still have to update some logos and graphics here and there,
but the idea is to diversify the palmtops on my channel,
not that I'm running out of ideas for the 100/200LX machines, to the contrary,
I have a long list of awesome technical projects to research and make videos for,
more than I can accomplish in at least one year...
But, I thought it would be more interesting to once in a while add a video about another palmtop,
mainly, the machines in my Psion collection, being the Series 3, 3a, 3mx, 5 and 5mx.
Back in the day when I bought a brand new HP200LX 1MB when I was 15 years old
(with money I earned from working a summer job assembling clone PCs in a shop nearby my house
), I already had a Psion Series 3a 1MB for about one year.
The Psion 3a was, until I had the 200LX, my whole life, literally, all my contacts, daily activities, documents etc were on it.
I used it to access BBS'es with the comms app and the 3link cable with a 9600 baud external modem,
and played a lot of the freeware and shareware games on it that I got from Steve Litchfield's Psion Archive CD-ROM.
I had the 3a with 1MB internally, and had a 4MB Flash card
(which was VERY expensive at the time!
) and a 2MB coin cell backed RAM card.
Unfortunately I don't have the code/executable anymore, but I wrote a complete vectorial drawing program on it in OPL
(Psion's Organizer Programming Language
),
with lines, circles, boxes/rectangles, arcs, text primitives etc... and you could zoom in/out and pan the drawing.
I also wrote some code and attached a microsoft 2 button serial mouse to it, to move the small crosshair cursor of my drawing program around the screen,
and selecting the operations was with the relevant keys on the keyboard like L for line, B for box, C for circle etc...
It also supported the grey plane, so it supported white, grey and black drawing and filling modes
OPL was such a great language, In my opinion, it rivaled Turbo Pascal in features and speed, and implemented everything you could do on the palmtop with ease
(like using the palmtop's OS's built-in libraries to draw menus, dialog and entry boxes etc...
)
Although the Psion machines aren't as flexible as the HP100/200LX in terms of software and hardware compatibility,
they are nonetheless very capable and I already have some ideas in mind to make cool videos about
I might even try to use one in my 200LX raytracing video, to see what the difference in speed is,
as I've got a working vmware image with windows 95 and the complete SIBO
(16bit
) C SDK, so I can compile C code for the Series 3 machines, and my raytracing code is old-fashioned ANSI C, so it should compile with minimal changes
I wonder if the faster CPU in the 3mx can compete with a double-speed 200LX
The 3mx is probably faster, as it has an NEC V30MX
(80C86 compatible
) running at 27.684 MHz, versus my 16MHZ 80186 in my doublespeed 200LX machines...
So what do you think about the channel name/focus change and do you have any ideas for videos you'd like to see that sport a Psion machine with or without an HP machine ?
Or, are there any other brands of 90's palmtops you'd like to see ?
One thing though, I'm not going to do any Windows CE or Palm devices as there seem to already be enough people talking about them and I'd like to focus on MS-DOS palmtops or Psion SIBO or EPOC machines...
Cheers,
Terrence
