Psion MC400

The Psion MC-400 runs on an Intel 80C86 processor, uses eight conventional 'AA' (or MN 1500, LR6) batteries, and has not only an inbuilt speaker, but also a microphone. Along one of the sides of the MC-400 standard mini-plug jacks permit headphones and/or an external microphone to connect to the unit. A touch pad just below the unit's display screen emulates the use of a mouse as a pointing device; the screen itself has a matrix 640 pixels wide, by 400 high. The addition of a voice processor module would allow users to record and playback their own diary notes, or to leave dictation for secretarial staff to type. According to a product information sheet from PSION, the new voice compression techniques employed in this module would permit eight minutes of speech to be stored in 64 kilobytes of central or secondary memory. If accurate, this would signify a giant step forward in digital speech recording technology; previously, getting a single minute of high quality, immediately useable digitised voice to fit in less than 512 kilobytes was doing well. Many things about the MC-400 beckoned the would be call software developer. The MC-400 came with the structured programming language called OPL.