HP 200LX

» see hp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

in 1998 i had my first 56k modem and was reading donanimhaber threads on the family compaq. the hp 200lx was already four years old then, sold mostly to american engineers and japanese salarymen and field scientists who needed a full dos prompt that fit in a jacket. it was not a thing i could have walked into a turkish electronics store and bought. its second-hand price after the eol was still more than my computer was worth.

but everyone in computing knew of it. it had a real qwerty keyboard, microscopic but usable. it ran lotus 1-2-3 unmodified. you could write basic programs on it or ssh from it later when serial-to-modem cards became cheap. it lasted weeks on two aa cells. in a world where laptops weighed five kilos and ran on lead bricks, this thing was a quiet miracle.

hp killed it in december 1999 because it wanted to push the windows ce jornada line. dos was unfashionable inside hp by then. the buyers who actually used 200lx units did not care what was unfashionable. for years after the eol there was a small market in third-party speed upgrades, replacement screens, and double-density flash cards. the cult never moved.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was inside ~

an 80186-compatible cpu at 7.91 mhz, 1 to 4 mb of ram, a 640x200 mono lcd, and a pcmcia type ii slot. it ran ms-dos 5.0 out of rom. its bundled software was lotus 1-2-3 plus an hp pim suite covering the usual phone book and calendar. you could load anything dos-compatible onto a flash card and run it.

the form factor was a flip clamshell about the size of a vhs tape cut in half. the keys were too small for proper touch-typing but exactly right for thumb-typing if your thumbs were not large. plenty of accounts exist of people writing whole reports on these things during fieldwork.

~ the dos holdout ~

hp announced the eol in 1999 and the last units shipped through 2000. there was no direct successor. the jornada 720 (1999) and 690 ran windows ce on a similar clamshell, but ce was a different os with different software and worse battery life. dos people did not feel served by them.

a japanese group called morphy planet tried to ship an open-source successor called the morphy one in 2001. it never reached production. by then dos as a target had vanished as a consumer thing, and the kind of buyer who would have paid for a 200lx clone had moved to either a laptop or a palm pilot.

~ the long tail ~

200lx units still surface on ebay and yahoo japan. they still boot. people still use them as kitchen counter clocks, ham radio loggers, or fieldwork notebooks. there is a reason the cult outlasted the product by twenty-five years. dos was small and predictable enough that a 1994 machine running it can still do its original job in 2026 without any cloud anywhere near it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »