“... shaped like a small brick... and could hold the equivalent of about two-and-a-half pages."
Astrid Wendlandt, Financial Times
It is 1984. Economies are booming, Newsweek magazine declares it "the year of the yuppie," and in the U.K. the Filofax personal organizer is the must have accessory for all young urban professionals. In London, though, Dr. David Potter is planning to make the leather-bound, paper-based Filofax obsolete.
Dr. Potter's company, Psion—the name comes from "Potter's Scientific Instruments"—had been in business for a few years already, making games and other software for early home computers like Sinclair's ZX Spectrum. In 1984 Psion entered the computer hardware market, releasing a new kind of handheld computer, the Psion Organiser. It was a hefty device, a rectangular slab of plastic with a small screen at the top and a keyboard protected by a sliding sleeve. It had a clock, a small memory, and it was powered by a 9-volt battery that could keep it running for months.
By today's standards, the Organiser was primitive, You could type in things on its tiny buttons, and it would remember them. And that was about it. Its drawbacks included a "write-once" memory that would eventually fill up with information and could only be erased by an ultraviolet lamp, and the fact that the keyboard was arranged in alphabetical order.
In 1986, though, Psion released a new version of the Organiser, increasing the size of the screen and adding a diary and alarm clock, among other handy applications. This, the Psion Organiser II, was the first computer truly worthy of the description "personal digital assistant" (PDA)—even though that phrase arrived only in 1992, when Apple's John Sculley used it to describe Apple's "Newton" MessagePad.
