A Note: I apologize to all for the delay in posting this column. I was unavoidably and unexpectedly stranded out of town. Hopefully, I will plan these things with more foresight in the future. - The Author
People often ask, "Oh, great and powerful comic book god, please tell us what tools and methods you use to create the bounty of fictive art by which you have blessed us, lo, these many years." Actually, only one person ever told me that, and she may have been kidding. Or drunk.
However, I have taken the above as a mandate, and I will be doing an occasional essay on the tools and methods of writing, as the spirit moves me. Today we will be discussing the Psion Palmtop computer.
I say, we because, for this week only, Storytelling will have a guest star, my oldest friend, Stuart Gold. Stuart has been my editor, critic, publisher, gadfly and sounding board over the years. He even appeared as a character when I was writing Jonny Quest for Comico; more importantly, for what is essentially a review column, he has been acclaimed in several states and the entire country of Spain, as the Pickiest Human on Earth. Today, he will be asking questions about our mutual hobby: micro-technology. Are you on the line, Stu? Say hello to ...
— Bill, hi! Listen I'm on the other line to Los Angeles, but I've got a great idea for our next project. Two words — table salt! I've been reading this book, do you know that every human being in this country consumes 17 pounds of table salt every year? That's a lot of built-in audience. I think we can really do something with that.
— Stuart... I don't think the books are saying eating that much salt is a good ...
— Or maybe it was 17 ounces a year. Or one ounce every 17 months. Anyway, it was 17 something. And that's the important thing. Not the 17, of course, but that salt is a part of our culture, and people like it.
— Stuart...
— See, a movie based on table salt, we can really promote the hell out of that. Pro-salt, anti-salt, people care about salt. And when you spin a little of that old Messner-Loebs Magic, a little social consciousness, some snappy dialogue ...
— Stuart, I thought we were going to talk about the Psion palmtop?
— We are. We are. I just thought we could do a little business too. You're a writer, nu? You write on this palmtop, yes? You write about, say, table salt. It's all a link in the great Creative Chain.
— Didn't you say you wanted something to write on, something you could have with you all the time, that would be easier to write on than a Palm or a Palm Pilot?
— Sure. I need that keyboard; and I need it with me — I'm a spontaneous kind of guy. Did you know the Roman legions used to get paid in salt? Salary-salt; Salt-salary — get it? There's your historical angle; now all you gotta do is create a strong central character, a spine of plot to hang the action on, some great conflict and humor, and a little sex. We'll be home free! But remember — it's gotta come out of truth; we don't want any Hollywood crap in our movie — not that it shouldn't be commercial ...
— Stuart...
— What? Oh, yeah. That Psion; I've been thinking about getting one. Go on, sell me on it; pretend I'm a customer. Why do you like it so much?
— Well, for one thing it was the greatest bargain I ever made. And you know I'm terrible with bargains.
— Tell me about it. You pay full price for everything; you even end up paying retail for wholesale! They see you coming from so far away...
— Okay, already; point made! But in this case it was different. You had been showing me your Palm Pilot, and I was thinking it was time to get something new in a PDA; the last one I had was lost in an ill-fated canoeing accident; but I really liked it. It had 32 K of memory and a separate conversion utility for DOS. And this was a couple of years ago; by this time, I figured, there had probably been improvements.
So the next time I was in OfficeMax I wandered over to the wall they had of PDAs. Wow! The standard memory was 256 K now, and the screens were bigger. This was promising; you see I had a dream. My dream, back in the 60's when I used to type on a Corona Electric, was to be able to type in an easy chair, or lying in a couch, my aching back supported. And to be free of the incessant clatter of the keys that went through my head like an icepick. (Actually, I had other dreams as well; I dreamed that I could correct mistakes, at will; move text around without cutting and gluing the paper; and write in any font I wanted: dreams so obviously far-fetched that I never bothered mentioning them to anyone.) As I started working in computers, more and more of my desires were met; and you, Stuart gave me my first truly quiet typewriter for a wedding present — a dot-matrix portable that printed on Thermofax paper and had a 16 character correctable readout. For a dyslexic writer that was heaven. I moved on: from CP\M to MS-DOS; from Windows 3.1 to Windows 98; but even laptops were heavy and awkward; I was still hunched over a table, leaning forward in a chair; my back still gave out after a while.
I was thinking of all this as I strolled down the line of PDAs, reading the specs on their labels: 256 K, 256 K, 256 K, 8 Meg, 256 K, 256 K ...wait a sec! Could that be right? A PDA with 8 megs of memory? What could a PDA do with so much RAM? I examined it earnestly. PSION SERIES 5, it read along the top. Like most PDAs it had a row of silk-screened icons along the bottom of the screen: Word, Sheet, Data, Agenda, Time, Calc, Sketch, Extras. Hmm... Word instead of, say, Memo. I touched the icon and a relatively full-featured clone of MS Word sprang into sight. It would allow one to format, say, comic book scripts directly. Cool. The interface was intuitive enough that within five minutes I had figured out how to turn it on and off; and I was able to launch each of its built in programs. As you can imagine, Sheet is a spread sheet; Data is a database; Agenda is a calendar program; Time allows you to set various alarms; Calc is a calculator; and Sketch is a fairly sophisticated drawing program. But a PDA with a drawing program? I instinctively drew my finger across the screen. It made a line; the thing had a touch screen! As I examined it, I found a red button on one edge of the case. I pressed it; a tiny red light came on. "Huh," I remarked. "I wonder what the red light means?" I pressed the button next to it.
"Huh. I wonder what the red light means?" echoed my own voice. A built-in digital voice recorder!
Obviously, this was one full-featured doo-hickey. The price tag was the same as all the other PDAs: $99.95. Was it a mistake? No, the head of the department explained. The Psion s5 was a British palmtop computer that OfficeMax would no longer be carrying. They had only the floor model left; it was "well-loved". There was a ¾ inch scratch in one corner; three of the keys had been removed; the pop-out scriber was missing; one of the little rubber pads on the bottom of the case was gone; the rubberized enamel on the case was peeling. They gave me a $15 break on the price, and the usual one year OfficeMax warrantee for $5 more. They were also able to scrape up the manual, the PC cable and CD Rom with PC linking software, called PsiWin, and the rest of the factory warrantee paperwork. One nice surprise was the power source: 2 AA batteries, backed up with a 3 volt lithium watch battery. The manual promises up to 40 hours of service from each battery change, depending on how often the screen is backlit; I've never gotten more than twenty-four. But, in a world where laptop batteries need recharging after three hours, 24 seems an almost fantastic luxury. In the last year and a half, I've changed the backup battery once, and only because I ran down the regular batteries by accident.
— Okay, Bill. It was a bargain; I get it. But what did you do about the keys, and the screen and the peeling paint?
— The keys were definitely gone, exposing the rubber nibs beneath; the "A", "Q" and "TAB" keys were the casualties. You could still type, but the nibs gave a squishy, uncertain feel. It threw off what little typing rhythm I have. I tried a couple of interim solutions, including molding and casting my own keys, but no go. Finally, I had a creative thought; The TAB and Q didn't get hit often enough to matter. It was the A that was the problem. And there was a key called MENU, the right size and shape, that was only used for summoning the pull-down menus, a job I did by touching the screen. I moved the key; problem solved.
The other significant loss was the scriber; you can use a finger, but the screen gets greasy. Plus the touch screen mechanism seems to work by judging pressure differences; a wide, soft pressure, like the tip of my broad German finger, doesn't always ring the bell; a tiny, narrow pressure, like the point of a key, works every time. Now you can send to England for scribers, 3 for $10; but for $1, you can get three plastic clay engravers that work perfectly; for another dollar you can buy 50 pointed pine skewers, meant for making corn on the cob or candy apples, that work even better. At those prices, you hardly feel a twinge if you misplace one.
— And the peeling paint and the missing "footlet"?
— I never notice the footlet. The rubberized enamel seems to be a general problem; a good idea with a half-life of about ten minutes. When I got home and logged onto the internet, searching "psion", there was some moaning and bitching about the paint on Psion newsgroups; but the plain fact is, once it all peels off, the case looks fine. And I discovered that a brand new Psion goes for about $600 American. I decided I could stand the scratch.
But the big surprise was the websites; there are hundreds and hundreds of Psion worship sites, most of them European. It turns out the Psion and its EPOC operating system are much better known in the land of the Euro, where a thriving subculture writes and trades freeware and shareware. There are umpteen games, macro programs that enable you to expand abbreviations into previously entered words (a blessing to the novelist and scriptwriter), collections of trivia, novels you can read on screen, the complete Bible, hundreds of sound files you can use for alarms, an encyclopedia, translations between metric and ...
— Yeah, yeah. But didn't you say there were only 8 megs? How much of that fits?
— More than you'd think. I didn't really understand how wasteful Windows is as a system until I got the Psion. Programs that would take 300 megs in Windows 98, run in 20 K in Psionland. Granted, everything is simpler, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It's like a 386 in your pocket. I also slid in a 40 Meg compact flash card for $120, and gave myself a second "hard drive". (This could explain why my batteries expire in half the time.) Now I carry the two novels, three movie scripts and four or five essays that I'm working on, along with every reference book I need, everywhere I go.
— Speaking of which, how do you carry it? It's not a shirt pocket thing, is it?
- No, it is a little over twice the size of the Palms; there's no help for that. The company sells a high-end leather belt case for $70, but I found a perfectly serviceable canvas model for $10 at my local Meijers (or K-Mart).
— So, in summary, you hate it?
— Big kidder. I admit it, I'm addicted to it; I've become an evangelist; I hang around in airports and urge people to try it. Granted, I have only one hand; with two a keyboard this small could take some getting used to, but I think it's worth the effort. I've written every word for the last year and a half on it; that includes Brave Old World for Vertigo, the Star Trek novel I'm trying to sell, the Johannes Falk Western novel I'm writing, Boreana Beane, numerous short stories and this column. When I finish one I plug in the cable to my PC, drag and drop the file to my PC's hard drive; it automatically converts and I print it.
— But here's the real question, Bill. What does any of this have to do with table salt?
— It doesn't have anything to do with table salt, Stuart. You wanted to buy a Psion; they now have a 5mx, with an anodized aluminum case, a brighter screen and 16 Megs of RAM (or ROM; with this set up, the distinction seems pretty moot). It costs around $600 from a dealer, if you can find one in the States; or E-bay always has a few for sale; average cost: $350.
— Well, I just hope we can jump on this table salt thing, before anyone else gets the idea. Remember how Kevin Costner scooped us on my idea of catsup bottles and how they bring people together through ancient phallic Sumerian crystal shapes?
— Stuart, that was Message in a Bottle and it didn't have anything to do with... Stuart, did I ever mention you're the salt of the earth?
— Salt of the Earth! That's our title! Pop open your Psion, Bill, and let's get cracking! I finally got Tommy Lee Jones' agent's hairdresser's cousin to return my calls, so we have our star; now we need a treatment to show him! Get writing!
