Acorn Pocket Books and Psion Series 3 & 3a


Pocket Books
Acorn rebadged the Series 3 and Series 3a as Pocket Book machines, and sold them mainly into the UK education market. Many schools bought machines for whole classes to teach them maths, physics, etc. without the expense of desktop computers. The original Pocket Book is a Series 3 clone, with some of the features of the Psion equivalent (such as the Agenda and OPL) removed. Subsequently these were made available on SSD, and a graph plotting application substituted. World and some of the financial functions in the spreadsheet were also removed, and the applications renamed as below:

Psion Name Acorn Name
Agenda Schedule
Data Cards
Sheet Abacus
Word Write
Pocket Book II
The Pocket Book II is a modified Series 3a, with the addition of the spellchecker (before the S3a had a built-in one). Each Pocket Book was available in a smaller range of memory sizes than the Psion originals. At first, they were marketed through the Acorn educational dealers, and then through Xemplar, the Acorn / Apple education joint venture in the UK.

PocketFS
With the Pocket Books in the Acorn range, it became important to have a way of linking them to their desktop machines. Consequently Acorn commissioned the production of PocketFS, the file transfer and conversion software. It was supplied complete with the A-Link, a serial link pod with modified firmware and wiring. The A-Link hardware will work with RCOM or PsiWin on a PC, but the PC hardware won't work on an Acorn RISC OS computer without modifying the wiring.
If you only have a 3-Link, it can be made to work with a RISC OS machine by changing the wiring as below:

If you try this, you might want to put an intermediate connector in the line so you can go to the PC configuration again, but it shouldn't be necessary. If it doesn't work, don't blame me, but others have made it work successfully. You'll then need to find a copy of PocketFS, which can't normally be bought without the Link hardware, although it can be found second-hand.


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