Psion Organiser II Model LZ

Back in 1984, Psion’s first pocket computer was the Organiser. This isn’t it. Two years later they released the Organiser II, and it sold so well that Psion made a few different models of it. They started with a two-line display, added more memory, increased it to 4-lines and added even more memory. The model I have, released in 1989, is the Model LZ.

The Organiser II is an industrial looking device with a chunky calculator aesthetic. The LZ model comes with a monochrome 4-line x 20-character display. It’s not designed for graphics having a slight gap between each character position. The first models only had 2-lines x 16-characters. Those extra characters and lines make a difference.

The Organiser II stuck with the calculator aesthetic right down to the keyboard. The keys, considering their style, don’t feel too bad, but the layout… It’s alphabetical! The horrors! At least they fixed that in the Series 3. They didn’t have many keys, only 36, but they made good use of them.

There are two slots on right hard rear of the Organiser II to accommodate two Data Pak’s.

Data Pak’s are the Organiser’s equivalent of disks and come in various sizes from 8K to 128K. They contain an EPROM and a proprietary interface chip which talks to the Organiser itself through a serial connection.

The Organiser has the built-in ability to write to the EPROMS as well as read them, but not to erase them. This being the case, the files and the filesystem are arranged to work within this limitation – the filesystem thus acts like any read/write filesystem.

Data Paks are also available with pre-purchased software on them, or with battery backed RAM.

On the top of the Organiser is an expansion port. This port can be used for connecting an external power supply, serial port Comms Link, printer port, bar code reader, magnetic card reader and various combinations of these.

The Organiser II always wakes up from sleep at the main menu and you can only switch it into sleep mode using the Off menu item from the main menu. Press the arrow keys then EXE (equivalent of Return or Enter) to select. Within an application, On/Cancel takes you back to the main menu and Mode brings up a program menu.

The two first items on the main menu, though, are Find and Save. They allow you to create entries in a flat database – Save new ones and Find existing ones. You can have multiple database files, delete, edit and copy records. An address book can easily be implemented using it.

The application called Month is the calendar, you can also access it through Diary with a daily summary view. You can enter appointments for a specific time on a specific day and set alarms for them. You can copy and paste entries but you can’t set repeating ones.

There is also a notepad, accessed though Notes. In this you can just string a set of notes. You can have many notepad files and you can search within them. You can even perform calculations on numeric data in a note, sort the lines of a note alphabetically, or password protect a note.

The Organiser II has an early version of Psion’s BASIC-like OPL programming language built-in. Procedures written in it can be used to extend functionality in the calculator or can be added to the Main Menu.

Among the devices that connect to the top expansion slot are a serial port. I would like one of these, but one has not appeared at the right price. I did acquire a Psion Printer power supply (not the printer) and an adapter card (just a bare card).