DOS compatible Palmtops and Subnotebooks

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Introduction

For a very long time I have been enamoured of small, more or less pocketable computers. I believe this infatuation started with a visit to CeBIT, now the worlds leading computer trade show, in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I had started my university education as an electrical engineer in the fall of 1988, routinely using the algebraic software package muMATH on my 80286 computer at home - at 16MHz a blastingly fast machine, outperforming most university-computers (which, in those days, were mostly timeshared and often batch-programmed mainframes).

So when I visited the CeBIT in 1989 (presumably, might have been 1990) and saw one of the first pocketable computers (essentially the size of the Sharp PC 3100, PoqetPC or many others of their day, about 1/3 A4 or some 12cm by some 22cm and maybe 2cm high) I immediately fell in love! Imagine the power - a true IBM PC (4.77MHz, CGA graphics even) in your pocket. At a time when portable meant you would be lugging around a 12kg monster. Load that with muMATH, and one could easily outperform all those posh HP-48 wielding classmates.

Well, actually I can't even remember what computer this was, and it might well have been some prototype - all I remember was that the Asians presenting the computer (Taiwanese?) were eager to talk even to lowly students such as me but were really looking for a corporate partner who would market those computers in Europe. Still, I had to have one - but of course could not afford one from my meager student loan / stipend, even if they had been available in Europe. But it got me hooked none the less...

Unfortunately I do not think those Asians ever managed to find a distributor - certainly this computer never showed up anywhere near me. What did show up was the Atari Portfolio. At only a couple of hundred US$ (or DM, for me) this was still quite expensive, but certainly much more affordable than the computer from CeBIT would have been. But unfortunately it was also much more limited, with only 512KB RAM (that's program memory and storage space!), DOS 2.11 compatibility and a tiny display of only 8 lines displaying 40 characters each (260x64 pixel). Still, many an afternoon did I spend in front of the display musing whether this computer would be able to run muMATH and whether I should buy one - I never did, though (as an aside: I now own one, but till today never tried running muMATH on it. Maybe I don't want to find out...).

Then in 1992 Olivetti released the Quaderno (Italian for notebook), an A5-sized subminiature-notebook with considerable cool, and soon it also reached a shop nearby - in this case the shop was Vobis, and the computer was named Highscreen Laptalk, but it was the Quaderno alright. Now here was a real computer that could match my desktop in horsepower - mostly because my desktop was now three years old, of course. And should I really get what is essentially a 16MHz 80186 with 1MB of RAM, a 20MB HDD and a monochrome CGA screen, when all my friends were replacing their 80286 with otherwise identical specifications with shiny new 80386?

And then I read that real soon now there would be the Quaderno 33, the 80386 version of the Quaderno. It would arrive any time now, and as it happened I was working as an intern for Philips in the fall of 1992 and therefore had some money to spend, and I would be going to Oxford for half a year in 1993 and therefore had the need for an ultraportable computer... But the Quaderno 33 never surfaced in any shop near me, and so I didn't get one of those either.

Well, to cut a long story short, I never purchased any sub-notebook in those days; but towards the end of the 1990s I found that all these dream-machines from my early years were now given away for less then US$ 100.-, and so I bought a number of them. They all have in common that I couldn't (or didn't want to) afford them at the time, but always craved them; they all run DOS (some only emulated though); they (virtually) all have keyboards; and they are all smaller than your average Notebook and mostly have some geek-factor even now. So here's my list of portables together with the date of purchase:

Overview of computers so far

My Notebooks

Date	Model	Serial no.	Page	Remarks
3.11.1998	Olivetti Quaderno	0011353	11.10.2000	replacement HDD
7.2.1999	IBM Thinkpad 701C	556X3X6	27.9.2000
15.7.1999	Sharp PC-3100	23013915	16.1.2004	mailing-list
21.2.2000	Olivetti Quaderno		11.10.2000
4.8.2000	IBM Thinkpad 360PE
21.9.2000	Olivetti Quaderno 33 (DM 355.00)	00010401	27.10.2000
2.3.2001	Fujitsu Poqet PC Plus	0201 0000 5039		mailing-list, serial connector
16.7.2001	Fujitsu PoqetPad Plus
12.10.2001	ASI Pocket Personal Computer	2480447		aka Memeorex Commuter Computer
12.10.2001	Atari Portfolio
7.11.2001	Sharp PC-3100	23002628	16.1.2004	mailing-list, FDD #23000564
3.11.2003	PSION 5MX Pro (Euro 80)
1.4.2004	HP 700LX (Euro 89,88)
1.9.2004	IBM PC 110 (Euro 356.55)
9.1.2005	Ericsson MC 218 (Euro 85.01)
9.1.2005	HP 200LX (US$ 80)
21.5.2005	NOKIA Organizer 9210i (Euro 80)
6.6.2005	HP 200LX 8MB DS (Euro 150)
8.6.2005	HP 200LX 8MB DS (US$ 154)

Mailinglists

Attention: The information below is outdated, go to the new listpage.

Since the original mailinglists seem to have died I have restarted two mailing-lists, one for the Sharp PC 3000/3100 (or, in short, the Sharp PC3K), and one for the Poqet PC. Send mail to one of

sharp-pc3k-request@kogs.informatik.uni-hamburg.de
PoqetPC-request@kogs.informatik.uni-hamburg.de

subscribe sharp-pc3k your@address
subscribe poqetpc your@address

1. Subscriptions to these lists are managed by hand and might take a short while.
2. I can not subscribe users of (at least) bigfoot.com, juno.com, or email.com (actually, email.com might work again). It would therefore be good if you would provide an alternate email-address.