Electronic organisers

Press, 30 December 1988, Page 16

Electronic organisers

From the “Economist,” London

IN THE mid-1980s no thrusting executive was complete without his/her “personal organiser” — a leather binder containing everything from address-book and diary to a career-planning chart. Then came the portable telephone, whispered into with ostentatious discretion. Now the electronic organiser has arrived. Psion, a British firm which created the first such digital diary-cum-calculator, sells about 200,000 a year. Competitors are piling into the market.

When Psion launched its handheld computer in 1982, it foresaw two markets. One was in the salerooms and warehouses of large companies. Here, stocktakers and salesmen needed a portable way to talk to the big computers back at head office. About half of Psion’s sales now come from companies — as well as many lucrative contracts to write software specially tailored to link its little machines into a firm’s computer network. The other half of Psion’s sales come from individuals keen to organise themselves electroni-

cally. Most use the machine as a “personal database” (i.e. address book and diary) or to crunch numbers too tough for their calculators to handle. It takes several times longer to tap a name or a date into the tiny keyboard of a hand-held computer than it does to write down on an Asprey pad. But hundreds of thousands of people seem to think it worth while, maybe because the computer can search speedily through stored names — or because it impresses their friends. Whatever the reasons, other companies are impressed with the market the Psion Organiser II has discovered. Japan’s Sharp recently launched a similar machine, and Casio has been nibbling at the edges of the market for some time. Other companies are selling programs that enable Psions to do tasks ranging from complex financial calculations to rudimentary French-English translation. A fledgling British firms has launched an electronic “Agenda”

with a new, faster way of entering “lunch with Desdemona.” It uses the Microwriter keyboard, which was invented some years ago by Mr Cy Endfield, a film director whose other works include “Zulu.” His idea soon gained the support of Sir Mark Weinberg, chairman of an insurance group, Allied Dunbar. He is a 30 per cent shareholder in Microwriter and has written its notably undaunting instruction book. In addition to the standard letter keys, the Microwriter has a second keyboard consisting of five unmarked keys, one for each finger. By pressing the keys in various, combinations, one can learn (baflingly quickly) to “type” almost as fast as on a full keyboard. The Microwriter was first peddled as a sort of hand-held wordprocessor, but only about 7000 were sold. Now the firm is hoping that the boom in elecronic organisers will revive its fortunes. Copyright — The Economist