In 1993 HP produced what can arguably be considered the grandfather of the modern netbook, the Omnibook 300. Also voted one of PC Worlds greatest PC's ever - not that I endorse their opinions in any way shape or form!
For the day, this packed a lot of technology into a small form factor: 16.3 x 28.2 x 3.6 cm, 1310g. Compare this with the EEE PC at 16.5 x 22.5 x 3.5cm, 900g.
386SXLV 20MHz Ultra low Voltage processor
2-6MB RAM
10MB Flash disk (12V Linear flash to begin with, CF/PCMCIA compatibility later) but it could hold 3 such cards
OS/Apps in ROM (DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1/Word/Excel)
640 x 480 16 Level grayscale 9-inch un-backlit display
Built in fax-modem
Serial, parallel, IR ports
Real instant on - static processor architecture could be stopped mid-clock-cycle and the RAM self-refreshed
...and the HP "paw" mouse which I rather like. To the extent that I have had the Omnibook 600's and 800's that succeeded it, too.
But the killer - 9 hours battery life from a 1600MaH 4.8v NiMH battery pack. At a pinch you could also drop in 4 AA alkalines too (or modern NiMH AA's for nearer 15 hours!)
A bit of calculation shows that this thing draws less than a watt. I have a portable book-sized solar panel that is rated for 2.2W. Hmmmm.
BTW, the 3 linear flash cards (Sundisk SDP10's) I have - which have no wear levelling or error correction - still work fine, 15 years on. Admittedly, they require a PCMCIA 12V supply which tends to cause modern Cardbus slots a bit of apoplexy but probably indicates that the bits are fairly soldily written. ROM-based DOS/Win 3.1 doesn't exactly pummel the drives with writes either.
2 comments:
Actually would I be able to use something like this:
Laptop ExpressCard to 16bit PCMCIA 32bit CardBus Adapter.
To sync files between laptop with expresscard and linear PCMCIA?
It may be possible - the Linear Flash cards that work with the 300 do require a 12V supply to write. I have seen these take out newer laptops that didn't provide enough power on that line so YMMV. (It didn't kill the laptop but it did cause it to power off instantly!)
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