Hewlett-Packard 95LX/100LX

The 95LX is on the left and the 100LX on the right.

COMMENTS

The 95LX was introduced about the same time as the Poqet PC.  As such, the 2 are quite similar.  However, the 95LX has several advantages.

One of the big selling features of the 95LX is the fact that Lotus 1-2-3 was included so taking it with you to work on spreadsheets when you were unable to fire up a desktop or even a laptop was a huge plus.  The bad news is the screen was limited to 16 lines X 40 characters.  This made it rather annoying when using most DOS programs

Initially, the 95LX was sold with 512K RAM installed.  If the owner was fairly daring, it could be upgraded to 1Mb RAM by soldering in a RAM chip.  HP figured this out and rather quickly installed the chip themselves and sold the "new and improved" 95LX with 1 Mb RAM.

The 95LX had another nice feature in that it included functionality of the HP 19B so the user could perform business calculations without having to drag around another calculator.

There was also a rudimentary word processor or memo processor as it was called, a basic appointment calendar, and a file manager.

The 100LX started off where the 95LX ended.  First, memory was standard at 1Mb and expanded later to 2Mb.

The DOS was upgraded to 5.0.  All the included applications were tweaked as well.

The screen was upped to 25X80, making it more DOS friendly.  In fact, HP hired an independent company to confirm this compatibility going so far as to even test Flight Simulator on it!

There were other tweaks included, but the biggest was the screen resolution and RAM expansion.

 If you were a previous owner of a 95LX, you could transfer all your data to the 100LX, but you had to run a conversion process to adjust for the screen resolution difference.

HP continued making the DOS Palmtop computers until 1999 when they switched over to Windows CE.

Surprisingly enough, this series of palmtop computers still have a strong fanbase.  Check out this link.