Back in the early 90's, when HP was still an innovative company with decent US R&D and manufacturing operations, they produced several machines that effectively anticipated the whole UMPC thing years in advance. Through the luck of my job at the time, I got hands-on experience with them all and my involvement with lightweight computing began.
The first of these devices was the 100LX - there was an earlier 95LX but the 100 was a lot better. This packed an MS-DOS 3.3 machine with PIM apps, Lotus 1-2-3 and a basic database into a pocketable clamshell form factor (6¼ x 3½ x 1 inches) which ran off 2 AA batteries. It had a PCMCIA slot that could take flash and SRAM cards and a serial port for mobile phone/modem connectivity on the road (the later 700LX even had a cradle for a Nokia phone built into the lid). The approx. 5-inch monochrome (4 greys) LCD was 640x200 and supported CGA graphics.
The processor ran at 7.5 MHz but a sizable modding community built up - processor overclocking, processor replacement and upgrading the soldered-on memory were all possibilities. The base model had 1MB of RAM but up to 96MB was possible (OK, on the slightly later 200LX anyway).
Such was the power of these machines that they still command good prices and support for such elderly tech.
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