Omnibook 300 revisited

After a little while gathering dust, I managed to score a 1.1 BIOS card for the Omnibook 300 off eBay. This means that the beast can finally use Compact Flash cards, and provides great resting place for some of the pile of CF cards under 1G that I have accumulated. The machine actually pre-dated the PCMCIA ATA specification so, on release, it could only use linear flash cards or one specific WD drive with a somewhat home-grown ATA-over-PCMCIA spec.

If you insert a blank (FAT, not FAT 32) formatted CF and boot up, the ROM DOS will ask you if you want to format it. This puts Doublespace on the drive which just takes up processing power and RAM. This made sense when all you could get was a 10MB flash card or a little 40MB WD hard drive but not with 256MB of CF goodness. So, politely decline and all the necessary boot-up files will be copied to the uncompressed drive.

I have been experimenting with alternative shells to Win 3.1 Program Manager since it's a bit painful. Back in the day I was fond of the IBM Workplace Shell for Windows which gave Win 3.1 an OS2 like look-and-feel with things like right-click context menus. However, it doesn't perform very well on the Omnibook and the OS/2 grey dialogues don't render very nicely on the unlit mono display. The next thing to try was Calmira II which attempts to replicate the Win95 shell and performs rather better.

I also rediscovered and joined the Omnibook mailing list - targetted at the classic OB's it hasn't got a lot of traffic now but  if you post it lights up with activity as OB fans come out of the woodwork. The archives are a mine of information.