Episode: 3444
Title: HPR3444: The Psion series 5mx
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3444/hpr3444.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:32:58

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 34444 Thursday, the 14th of October 2021.
Today's show is entitled The Jean-Series 5 MX. It is hosted by Nilezzo and is about 20 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is a show where I talk about my experiences of the
Jean-5 MX, a portable computer, from the late 90s.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support Universal Access to All Knowledge by heading over to archive.org
forward slash donate.
Hello, hello, I'm Nico and today I want to talk to you about an old thing, a very specific
old thing. In fact, a very cool old thing, which is the
Syon series 5 MX, which is a PDA, a personal digital assistant, although it's far more than that.
I'll get into that later from the late 90s, I believe 1998.
The reason why I want to talk about it today is because, well firstly because I think it's a
really cool device, I want to talk about it. Secondly, because I am actually two years late to making
this episode. I at AgCamp 2019, so October 2019, AgCamp, which is a Linux conference, free
culture, open source, creative commons, it covers a lot of ground, a fellow HPR host Dave Morris
gave me a Syon series 5 MX. Huge thanks for that, by the way.
Amazing offer, amazingly kind, and he said that it was on the condition that I did an HPR
episode about it, and I am two years late, so I apologize. I didn't want to make an
episode until I had a development environment set up, and to have development environment,
obviously you need a working device, and my Syon wasn't working and then the COVID pandemic
hit, so I couldn't get it repaired. But recently with the vaccines and with the lifting of some
of the lockdowns, it's back, it's working, and I managed to get a development environment set up,
so now I've got everything in place to record this episode. So I said that it's a PDA.
What exactly is it? There's a lot of them. Well, the way I best like describing it is that,
and you can look up photos if you want, but the best way to describe it is it's like a tiny laptop.
It's like it's a laptop form factor, but it will fit in your pocket, and it has a monochrome
display, and it has this hinge, this really cool hinge mechanism that I can't describe in audio,
but it opens up, and as you open it up, the keyboard sort of pops out the front, comes out the front,
I don't know how to describe it, but it's a really cool mechanism, and
yeah, monochrome touchscreen, it's got a full keyboard, and it's got compact flash storage,
it runs on double A's, and will run weeks on a pair of double A's. I think mine ran a couple of weeks
on a pair of double A's back when I was using it regularly.
A compact flash storage, it has a serial port, which is a proprietary connector,
unfortunately, and it is running the E-Poc operating system, which a fun fact is that the E-Poc
operating system was the basis for what became Symbian, which you'll recognize if you ever
owned a Nokia phone in the mid 2000s, mid to late 2000s.
So it was marketed in the late 90s, originally, as a PDA,
sort of competing in the same market as devices like Palm pilots and whatnot,
but I think it's unfair to call the 5MX of PDA because really what it is is it's a computer,
and it has a full onboard office suite, it has word processor spreadsheet and database,
it has like a painting app and a notepad, and then it will have your normal PDA things,
you know, with contacts app and a calendar. It's got a couple of little games, and you can
install your own apps on it, and you can also program for it. It has a non-bord development
environment, and you can also program for it for a PC, but I'll get on to that later.
And I used this Sion computer as my main, actually, is my only portable machine
from 2019 through to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when sadly mine failed. I'll get onto that
as well later, and it was great. It's a really cool device, the keyboard is quite nice to use,
a lot nicer than you'd expect, and I used it for all of my schoolwork, I used it for I use
the spreadsheet app to manage dungeons and dragons' character sheets. It's incredibly nerdy, I know,
but I got a lot of use out of it, and it is still a very functional device, and it's still a
device that actually people are impressed by. I remember when I was doing my schoolwork on it,
you know, people were, you know, legitimately super impressed, people thought it was some,
you know, fancy new thing, and it's it's over 20 years old now, but it's still
more capable than modern machines. There is a problem, there are some problems that come from
the fact that it's an older device. The first one is synchronizing it with a modern machine,
so synchronizing mine with the Linux PC in 2021, I had to get the serial cable, which I also got
from Dave, thank you, and a USB to serial adapter, and connecting those together, connecting
that up to the sion and connecting that into my Linux PC. I could also I also then had to
download PLP tools, which I'll link in the show notes, which is a suite of utilities for transferring
files to and from sion devices on a modern Linux PC, and these surprisingly work quite well.
I found that the PLP fuse, which is the one that let you mount it as a file system,
was a bit buggy, but PLP FTP, which is the a command line interface for file transfers,
it isn't actually an FTP server, but it's it's it's a command line interface similar to the UNIX
FTP tools. It works quite well with getting files and run off the sion. The problem is that then
when you get these files, they will be largely in sion's own proprietary formats.
So this was designed to be used with a tool called sion, which runs on Windows 9598,
and sion could convert these sion file formats to and from Microsoft Office,
but sion obviously doesn't run on a modern machine, certainly doesn't run on Linux.
So there are third party tools you can use to convert these files as one called Nconvert,
which I'll also put in the show notes. It's a archive.org link because most sion software isn't
online anymore. When when you find when you try and look for software for it, you will find a
sea of dead links, you know, index pages linking to things that don't exist, you know, files that
haven't been archived, but archive.org has most, if you look through the way back machine,
you'll be able to find a lot of sion software, which is really cool and really useful.
So thank you archive.org, I think they're actually a sponsor of the show. Thank you archive.org
for preserving software and letting the user's 20 year old device in 2021. So yeah, so but I
and so there is this conversion software. What I tended to do was I mostly only used the word
processor and spreadsheet. I didn't manage to get agenda or that's the agenda app or the
context list or any of those synchronizing properly with a modern PC unfortunately, but I did get,
mostly I would import an export just plain text.txt from the word processor and I would import
an export CSV files from the spreadsheet and that's that's how I used those two. So I would write
on the sion usually in markdown and then export that as a txt file and then copy that across to my
PC and then use pandok or some other tool to turn it into a printable document and that that
workflow worked quite well for me through using it for school work, mostly. Yeah, so you can,
and there's lots of other software for it. There are some good sites, there's free park which is
still up. They made a lot of software and they still their website is still available.
And there is things like there's three lib which I believe they still you can buy a CD
with with a bunch of sion software on it, but I didn't buy a CD. It's very, you can tell what
era it came from where it was easier to mail people's CDs full of software than it was to
distribute it over the internet. The yeah, and there's plenty of available software. I tried,
there was like some little bits of music stuff like I would use it as a metronome and for like
tuning instruments. There's a tuner app available. There's a few games and there's ports of
some emulators, although playing them on a monochrome screen is not the greatest.
There's some ports of some games, there's even like I found like CAD software that would
run on the sion, although I never really used it much. It's a very flexible device. Now developing
software for it, you basically have two options. So there's opl2 which is the on board programming
language. And you can program opl2, you just boot up the thing and pick program from the menu
and you can program it in opl2. opl2 is a dialect of basic. It's not really a dialect of basic,
but it's close to a dialect of basic. It's very quick to make things in opl2 that aren't too
sophisticated, but if you want to make anything more sophisticated than like a couple of dialogue
windows and a bit of communication or reading and writing a file and doing a bit of editing,
then you're probably not going to get what you want out of opl2. You can make it work certainly,
but it's a little limited. There's also a software development kit, a C++ software development kit
that would run again on windows PCs of the era. And the C++ SDK is
I spent quite a while trying to track down a copy of it. Again, archive.org finally came to
the rescue when I was trying to track down a copy of it, but it's very under-documented,
very poorly documented. There are some sources that I found that would point to the fact that
the SDK was forever unfinished. And I think that that certainly shows it's not very well developed.
It's the SDK uses a weird old version of GCC and is tied together with Perl scripts. I tried
running UnderWine with no luck and then I set up a Windows XP VM. I was doing all sorts of
complicated pass-throughs to try and make it run on a modern machine. It was a good week
of messing around just to try and get like a Hello World program to build.
I did find and what I'll link in the show notes is a Linux SDK which is still running most of
the original stuff under wine, but it's it's set up to be nicer to use under Linux and it does
all of the faffing for you, so that's good. There wasn't much documentation, so I went and tracked
down a book that I saw mentioned online as being sort of the site on programmers Bible.
This book called Professional Symbian Programming. I couldn't find a copy of it online anywhere,
so I bought a copy on eBay which was tobacco stained and had torn off corners. It was essentially
a ruined copy of the book, but it was good enough that I could scan it in and digitize it.
For scanning it, I don't have a book scanner. I don't think most people have a book scanner,
so I scanned it using two cardboard boxes placed at an angle to each other and then a camera
on a tripod pointing down at one of the cardboard boxes and just taking photos of every page,
and this is like a 1,100 page book. So this was a couple days of work just scanning in this book
and then another couple days of work, cropping it, aligning it, fixing up the pages, finding missing
pages, fixing up the sort ordering, and I did manage to scan and digitize this book, so if you want
to copy of this book, I'll put a copy of it on archive.org, and that will also be in the show notes.
But it uses a strange, I mentioned that it uses a strange version of GCC. It also uses a strange
dialect of C++. So it has its own exception handling stuff which doesn't work how anything else
in C++ works. A lot of stuff is handled by macros. You have to build using GCC3 because
anything newer than GCC3 doesn't work, and in fact even getting GCC3 to work, it's a strange
patched version of GCC3 that doesn't exactly behave how you want it to. Instead of just using
make files, it uses something called macmake, which is a strange make file method generator written
in Perl that's just beyond my comprehension to be honest. So I didn't really get into C++
on development that much just because of how unusual it is, and it just didn't seem very fun.
But yeah, but using the existing applications, I used them for, again, all my schoolwork for a
good, from from, I'll come through to the start of the pandemic, so a good six, seven months,
and it did a great job, I loved it, and I still love nice eye on today. It's a very nice device,
but unfortunately, sort of towards the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, tragedy struck,
and the display cable, I mentioned the nice hinge mechanism, it's only possible because of
the display is connected to the board with a flexi cable, and that flexi cable is quite prone to
failure. In fact, it's a fault so common, it's listed on the Wikipedia page for the Sion 5 MX,
is this specific flexi cable failure, and my Sion developed the same failure, unfortunately,
and that's that's also why this episode is late, because I wanted to get it fixed up before
recording an episode, and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. So the, they're, luckily,
is still places that will replace these display cables for you. The Sion X are practically,
well they're not practically anyone, there's a couple of others, but Sion X are the most reputable
Sion repair place, but they quoted me 130 pounds to replace the cable, which I couldn't
afford at the time, so luckily I managed to get a friend who knew how to do the delicate surface
mount soldering that was needed for that fix, and they charged me less, so I got my Sion working
again, and I still use it, I use it to make notes, and I use it generally to make quicker notes,
which I'll then transfer over to my PC, once I'm done with it, but I'm, since the repair,
I've been more wary to take it out with me places, because they used to carry it with me everywhere,
and I've been more wary to take it out with me places, so it sort of doesn't get as much use now,
as I would want it to, but yeah, it's still a cool device, and if you want more about anything here,
you know, more on Sion development, or daily usage, or, you know, book scanning, maybe even,
then feel free to ask, and I will be happy to do follow-up episodes, or blog posts, or something,
and yeah, it's a really cool device, it has that unfortunate common failure, but if you can
deal with the hassle of serial cables, and semi-obscure Unix tools, and potentially having to
repair the display for yourself, I think it's a really cool device, and if you're interested in
retro computing, or if you just want, you know, something portable for note-taking, for doing
wood-processing tasks on the go, I would recommend it, it's a cool device, they're quite
expensive on eBay now, but come a bit of a collector's piece, I think, but yeah, cool thing,
uh, that's that, um, thank you for listening to me.
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