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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of Lotus 1-2-3, the best computer I have ever owned was the HP 200 LX Palmtop - https://www.palmtoppaper.com

It was about the size of a graphing calculator, and ran MS-DOS 5.0 with a black and white CGA display, and had Lotus 1-2-3 and rudimentary task-switching.

Simply phenomenal for 1994. Nothing has ever really come close; maybe someday I'll modify one so I can use the keyboard and replace the screen with a modern phone.

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Beat me to it! ;-) I continue to use my (three!) HP 200 LXs in different parts of my lab for different reasons. The most 1-2-3 stuff is for analyzing S Parameters and other RF tasks (conversions, ratios, formulas, Smith Charts).

Two AA batteries power it for a least a month; you could recharge NiMH with the built-in charger if you wanted. I use the PCMCIA card slot to hold a battery-backed SRAM, allowing complete backup (via automatic macros) of the entire machine (dead main batteries are not killers, here in the pre-FLASH world).

And, the comm -- you can plug a special cable in to get 115,200 serial port. And you have IrDA --- I wrote the very first IrDA-compatible 'stack' on that machine (and at the time sold compatible discrete IrDA HW, so you could attach to another end, e.g. a PC).

Sorry to highjack a 1-2-3 thread with praise for the HP 200 LX, but that was (is) one HELL of an awesome machine, still in use in my lab to this day.

I don't use my HP 200LX much, but one of the reasons is definitely the constant risk of data loss. Are those backup macros available anywhere?

They're probably somewhere in the archives of https://www.palmtoppaper.com

The simplest ones were just batch files that copied things around.

I was about to make the same comment. It was a remarkable machine. I remember buying it in 1995. It was so small that it could fit into a shirt pocket. I was in college at the time, and I remember that I had an old Radio Shack dot matrix printer that I could hook it up to. It was a real step up from the TI-85.

I remember printing to certain HP printers that had an infrared port - such amazing capabilities.

It still feels more capable to me than things like the Raspberries Pi.

Hmm.. I take that to mean it’s serving your needs directly now, and getting a pi to do those specific tasks would be more effort than it’s worth. But it’s a bridge too far, sir, to say a 200 LX is more capable than a Pi. ;) I bet one could create a replica 200 LX with a Pi zero with more features, but one could not replicate the Pi with a 200 LX. I know, I know, POC||GTFO, but I think it’s a good way to think about it.

That's what I'm getting at - the Pi is amazingly powerful, but it doesn't come in a clamshell with a built-in screen and run for a month on a pair of double As.

I would really like something that was the exact form factor of a 200lx, but with a modern very low power chip and a color screen, even if it only ran for a week or so.

Well, you could scoop out the internals of your 200 chassis and slip in a pi zero W, an oled screen, etc. it would be some work but there’s probably no reason you couldn’t pull it off. You’d need a different (and better?) battery solution than AA, but it’s really not hard to get your pi to run off battery and take usb-C charging. You might enjoy reading these links:

Somebody did just this with a 95 LX. https://liliputing.com/raspberry-pi-brings-an-hp-95lx-palmto...

The details page from the guy that did the 95 LX: https://hackaday.io/project/172230-hpi95lx

People here talking about similar ambitions for the 200LX https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7055384

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