Talk:HP 200LX

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[edit] vfd link

This article was proposed for deletion January 2005. The discussion is archived at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/HP 200Lx. Joyous 03:55, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Notes

  • Socket Services 1.0 is built in
  • very primitive Card Services is provided
  • The 1MB/2MB internal memory should be mentioned.
  • The windower / task swapper should be mentioned.
  • The productivity applications should be mentioned.
    • For the time (even now), I'd consider a lot of the functionality to be quite revolutionary. Apps like the database functions, the macroing, the calculator and the spreadsheet could all be bound together in subtle ways.
  • Overclocking past 15.8 MHz is possible with a different kind of crystal. There even a special driver out there.
    • I wonder if the overclocking topic mentions the old 8086 crystal overclocking concept.
  • The "chicklet" keyboard should be mentioned, as it was truly revolutionary. This style allowed for a smaller keyboard while maintaining good useability even with big-thumbed people.
  • Various kinds of modding projects exist.
    • More internal memory
      • This internal memory can be converted to emm. It's a pretty big deal actually. It's useful for running the bulkier applications.
    • Backlighting
  • I have a metric assload of notes kicking around.. not just on my own website but on paper. I should consolidate it all, but it's slow going.. especially since I'm not really using the thing right now, even after buying a compact flash card. Sigh.
  • Cousin palmtops which should be mentioned at least in passing include:
  • Minix: http://minix.technoir.org/
  • CGA-compatible FTN liquid crystal: 640 x 200 pixels
  • Two layers of zoom (fixme: describe the sizes). This zooming was also available in the window manager.
    • 80x25, ?? x ??, 40 x ??

-- Sy / (talk) 18:48, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pictures

I can take more pictures by request. -- Sy / (talk) 16:08, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Additional info for your consideration

My name is Everett Kaser. I was a software team member on the 95LX, 100LX, and 200LX development at HP. Extra info about your article that might be of interest:

The Lair Of Squid game was written by Andy Gryc "on his own time", not as an official HP project. Someone had brought in an early B&W digital camera (very low-resolution), and in playing around with it, Andy got the idea of taking pictures of the HP software team and (after converting them to VERY VERY low-res pictures) including them as a cookie in the game. This was done without HP management's knowledge, and wasn't publicly known until after the unit was shipping.

The self-test poems: I joined the 95LX project late in the development cycle, and my task was to write the self-test for it. Some text was needed for a "text readability" test, and I'd always enjoyed limericks, so I created the first one. I suspected that HP management wouldn't allow it, but no objections were raised, so it stayed. After intro, a forum on CompuServe originally for HP's calculators became heavily about the 95LX. I was asked by the moderator to spend time on the forum answering questions, but I didn't have a CompuServe account and wasn't going to pay for one. The moderator, after much fighting with CompuServe, convinced them to give me a "free" account as a "contributor". Several folks on the forum were huge early supporters of the 95LX, so during the development of the 100LX, I added a second poem to the self-test, as an "inside joke" for the CompuServe HP forum folks. "On my way to the Forum" was a direct reference, and "the Burg On The Wire" was an indirect reference to the CompuServe HP Forum. "charging a fee for sharing their treasure" was reference to CompuServe originally not wanting to give me free access to the Forum. "Good man" was reference to "Dave Goodman" and "Mark my words" was reference to Mark Scardina, two of the early and VERY vociferous supporters on the forum, and "the Dickens, I say" referred to Ted Dickens, the forum moderator. The third poem was added for the 200LX (after all, the 95LX and the 100LX each got their own poems, so the 200LX had to have one too!) Unfortunately, the final line about "Who knows what comes next, the clock is a tickin'", which was intended as a tease regarding future products in the line, was all too prophetic in the opposite direction: not long after the 200LX, the entire line was shipped off to the Singapore HP division, effectively killing it.

Regarding "significance" of the 95LX, it WAS one of the first true "palm top" computers, being a fully functional computer in the palm of your hand, and it was so significant at the time that Peter Jennings covered it with a short story on the national "ABC Evening News" the day it was introduced!

Oak Bog 16:22, 11 January 2007 (UTC)