Bletchley museum treasures vintage tech
Summary: ZDNet UK took advantage of a recent visit to Bletchley Park to uncover some of the thousands of items of IT heritage that the National Museum of Computing has in store
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Psion Protea Prototype
Psion Protea Prototype
There's a huge story to tell about Psion, one of the UK's most innovative consumer electronics companies and one of the few that could outdesign anyone on the planet. Protea was the codename for the Series 5 PDA, which remains one of the benchmarks for elegance, functionality and plain fit-for-useness.
Running an ARM chip from two AA batteries that lasted up to 20 hours, it had a half-VGA resolution backlit greyscale LCD and an utterly charming slide-out keyboard that, in the opinion of many, has yet to be bettered in anything this size. The operating system, EPOC32, became Symbian, and came with built-in spreadsheet, word processing, database, diary and contact management.
It was never actually produced in yellow. Shame.
Photo credit: Rupert Goodwins
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