I have mentioned about my PSION MC600 several times in recent posts. As
you may know, it's an AAA battery-powered MS-DOS laptop made by PSION
about 1989. A quite nice device with a great keyboard, a good passive
LCD screen (640x200) and with excellent battery life.
But what software I have and use here?
It runs the MS-DOS 3.3. The OS is in ROM so it cannot be replaced (it
should be possible to boot a different OS from a floppy drive it one has
such thing - there is no build-in floppy and the MC600 external floppy
drive is both rare and expensive). All other software has to be
installed (I read in several places that the LAPLINK software should be
in the ROM but my device has none).
There is a space problem: to obtain excellent battery life PSION
decided not to use a HDD here. The device has 1024 kB of RAM which can
be used for file storage (as a RAMdisk, that is) and 4 SSD slots. These
accept normal SSD media which are compatible with the PSION Series 3
handhelds and the Workabout MX industrial handhelds. The only (but
important) limitation is that the MC600 is too old to support the Type
II FLASH SSD cards (amost all Flash ones with capacity 1MB or more are
Type II). It can accept RAM SSD cards of any available capacity,
though. But big RAM cards are even more precious than the MC600 itself
(I have just one 2MB card and even this is a third-party one).
Thus in practice one is limited to 4x 1MB of "disk" space. As an
addition there is the internal RAM disk but I don't recommend to rely
on this too much - it is erased after restart. And this is the MS-DOS
so restarts are uncommon. SSDs have no problems with restarts (the RAM
type SSDs have backup batteries).
So the software:
* the Volkov Commander (a small and fast thing - do your remember?)
* the Kermit for MS DOS (to transfer files)
* the UnZIP software
* the Vim 5.3 (fast enough even on a 4.77MHz CPU)
* the Gnuplot 3.1 or so (not so fast but it works)
* the SC 6.21 spreadsheet (slow start, then OK)
* the Matlab (the first version, incompatible with current ones)
* the Power C 2.21 (you need - and still can - to buy a licence)
* the LZEXE executables compressor (Power C makes huge files)
* the PSION CL.EXE software
* the PSION ORG2.EXE development environment
* the FT.COM Atari Portfolio communication software
I thing that (except some programs which I write for myself) there is
no more. I use the Vim most frequently, I think (for texts like this
one, for programming and so). Sometimes I use the SC to make simple
tables and the Gnuplot to visualize the data. I have several simple
computing programs which I compiled with the Power C on the device and
compressed with the LZEXE (the Power C makes pretty big binaries -
usually they are over 36kB). The MATLAB (0.99 or so) is here mostly for
fun because its syntax is too different from the modern one and some
of its possibilities are very limited (there can be only on-line
functions, for example).
I sometimes connect the MC600 to my SGI O2 and use the Kermit to
transfer data. I also tried to use it as a serial terminal (connected
it to the /dev/tyf1 of the O2 and ran the Gnuplot on my IRIX - the
Kermit can act as a Tektronics graphical terminal so I was able to
generate plots on the O2 and see them on the MC600... It was slow but
still faster than a native Gnuplot on the MC600). I actually never
tried to connect the PSION MC600 to the PSION Organiser II (I still
have to find the right cable) but I connected the Atari Portfolio (via
parallel port) and it worked very well. But now I have no active
Portfolio (I put all - both - of my devices to storage).
The Volkov Commander is of great use here: not only it provides usual
two panels to manage files but it also provides a command line history
for the DOS prompt, it shows the time and it has a very fast text file
viewer and the editor - this is MUCH FASTER than the Vim 5.3 (anyway I
prefer the Vim because of VI keybindings).
