It's seriously underselling ICL to call it a consulting company, though by the time of the Fujitsu acquisition that might be accurate.

Yes, though I think it's being positioned as a commuter service for the people of Bewdley to get to Birmingham and back rather than for visitors to get to Bewdley.

It's a rhetorical device to emphasise the reason for cancellation, not a revision.

Richard Walker tried to become a Conservative MP, but when no constituency party selected him as their candidate defected to Labour, who put him in the House of Lords.

> I probably missed a lot of them

Psion is the big one - the Organiser, Series 3 and Series 5 in particular. The latter was the genesis of Symbian, which Motorola was also a partner in.

Psions were PDAs, not really in the smartphone arena until their OS (EPOC?) became Symbian and started appearing on Nokia phones.

Same for Palm - it wasn’t until the Treo series that they started trying to make inroads in the smartphone field.

I had both Palm PDAs (a V and a tungsten 3) and a psion (diamond Mako), fun times with portable computers.

There was also the Qualcomm pdQ and the Kyocera 6035 I think that combined a Palm and a phone/cellular modem. It’s surprising to me that it took as long as it did for smartphones to really get popular.

Some of it was just that the typing UI was pretty bad until the blackberry had the mini keyboard and then Apple came out with a usable touch screen/software combo that was good enough.

Also for a long time web browsers on phones/PDAs existed and worked, but the UI was lousy so they were very cumbersome to use. Apple had a few big innovations in UI that helped, multitouch, and double tap to zoom to a column, but the 2006 era windows mobile phones also had fairly decent browsers. Microsoft really blew it on phones.

> it wasn’t until the Treo series

This was because the acquisition of Handspring, right?

Ahh correct, I forgot about that. And do I remember correctly that Handspring was founded by ex-Palm employees to produce PDAs with licensed PalmOS and a cellular modem/phone built in?

I remember showing up in meetings with a Psion Netbook in '99 was a nice flex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_netBook

Paul Fellows absolutely claims that. From https://astrospeakers.org/provider/paul-fellows :

> He worked on the first generation of home computers and lead the design of the RiscOS operating system for the ARM processor, including inventing the apps and icon bar user interface that has since spread to phones and computers across the world

Well, a reminder of the origin story of RiscOS: https://binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Acorn/fellows.php

Paul Fellows later went on to be the CTO of AlertMe, which became the basis of British Gas' Hive service, and then Lowes' Iris product line.

Dot matrix printers + fanfold paper

These are still heavily used at airports and the sound of the dot matrix printer going at the gate is usually a sign that boarding is starting soon.

> Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth

Civilization and The Ascent of Man were both commissioned by Attenborough - he had a major impact on the broadcast landscape well beyond natural history.

We watched all of The Ascent of Man in middle school. The only thing I remember is that when the narrator, Jacob Bronowski, gestured with the back of his hand (fingers up), he always tucked his middle finger behind his ring and index finger. I assume this was so that he wouldn't "give the finger" to the audience.

(I've been wasting neurons on this for fifty years...)

It's the same Greek root as Kubernetes