[garethsprice]

The Acorn was a rebadged Psion 3 rather than a precursor. I remember as I lusted after the Psions on display in Boots as a (dorky) child, and was ecstatic when our school piloted the Acorns.

(Psion and Acorn, two more examples of how the UK is capable of developing world-leading tech but not at successfully marketing it...)

[triggercut]

Wow! I stand corrected. I was led to believe that Acorn went bust and sold to Psion. I thought it went Acorn Pocket Book 1, Acorn Pocket Book II, Psion 3.

Live and learn. Thanks! :-)

[lproven]

Good heavens no.

Psion did the software bundled with the Sinclair 16K/48K ZX Spectrum that was bundled at launch. It also wrote the bundled apps for the Sinclair QL.

Then it did its own line of pocket computers: the Organizer, the unsuccessful MC solid-state laptops, which it then miniaturised into the very successful Series 3, 3A, 3C and 3MX.

Acorn licensed these and sold them with changed software in the ROM, with an schools/educational focus instead of PDA functions.

Psion followed on with the Psion 5, using Acorn's ARM processors and a whole new OS, EPOC32.

That evolved into Symbian and powered the 1st mass-market smartphones. It's now FOSS.

Acorn made it big because it designed the first mass-market RISC chip, the ARM.

Acorn spin-off Arm is alive and well and the Arm chips are the most widely-used CPUs in the world, with about 10x-100x as many sold every year as all x86 put together.

Psion, sadly, is no more.

[isr]

Can confirm, as my first Psion was the Paion II, a calculator formfactor device with full keyboard and OPL programming language.

My later Psion 5 ended up spending most of its time running a zx spectrum emulator - go figure :-)