27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful

Re:27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful by KerrAvon on Friday June 02, 2023 @04:38PM (#36170461)

The person you're replying to was talking about the Apple II era, when floppies held less than 200k at best. Availability of 2.44 MB floppy drives was an extremely late development, and IIRC rare to actually find in the wild.

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Re:27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful by anyfoo on Friday June 02, 2023 @07:53PM (#36172291)

Extremely rare. I never encountered one, and I had a lot of niche stuff in the 90s.

1.44MB was the effective capacity of floppies until they died out. There was stuff like VGACopy that could format them with higher capacity (since floppy controller access was fairly low level), but it was an uncommon thing among tinkerers, the disks themselves were not marketed for more than 1.44MB, and I doubt they were tested above their nominal capacity (and even at that they were not exactly known as super reliably).

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Re:27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful by lproven on Sunday June 04, 2023 @09:12AM (#36185335)

There never was a 2.44MB disk. You're muddling up 1.44MB (which were really 1.4MB) and 2.88MB.

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Re:27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful by 6510 on Monday June 05, 2023 @08:46AM (#36195443)

I remember using a mechanical keyboard, imagine having to replace the paper every page with your hands! If one was to argue that is a significant hurdle in writing a book I would also have a hard time containing my cynicism.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Sholes-G...

What a marvel of engineering. All I got is plastic boxes. Thinking about it I'm not sure if having the next paragraph written by a different person is actually a good idea. Organizing your notes into a book undisturbed by better men is sure to impress a lot more. I would hope the final draft of my book about antique hardware wouldn't quote someone who remembers the bad parts better than the good.

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