Psion MC series

The A4-sized, elegant notebook had an excellent 640 × 400 pixel LCD and - at a time when Windows was still at version 2.11 (without window management, multitasking) - a graphical user interface with multitasking. Instead of a mouse, this model has a uncommon for 1989 year touchpad (only Gavilan SC was a widely known model with this feature) - a technology that would not be taken up again until years later.

The newly developed SIBO operating system allowed hot swapping of the flash memory cards in the 4 memory slots, and with the two hardware expansion slots, the device seemed to be ready for all future developments. But it turned out differently. For one, the price was quite high at £ 845, and the memory cards were extremely expensive. On the other hand, the software was not yet fully developed for market launch: the word processing was disappointing, the programming language OPL was adopted almost unchanged by the Organizer II and did not support the graphics capabilities of the device, and professional developers had to wait over a year for the SDK. The announced voice compression module was never completed, and apart from a parallel port, there were no hardware enhancements. In addition, the press accused the device of incompatibility with the PC.

The sales was not great, and SIBO Version 2, released in 1990 as a free update, didn't change anything, although it came up with a WORD-like word processor and a significantly improved OPL version. The slimmed-down MC 200 version with a blue and white, half as high screen and 128 kB RAM (instead of 256 kB) sold even worse. The MC 600 was just as hastily thrown onto the market. This used - probably as a reaction to the press criticism - MS-DOS as the operating system and had 768 kB of RAM and a 1 MB Ramdisk, which drove the price up again. The touchpad was dropped in favor of a function key bar, and the screen resolution was only 640 × 200 pixels according to the CGA standard. The machine was a flop from the start.