The HP 200LX

by PsychoWeasel

I consider myself a portable hacker.

Yes, I have an AT&T i386 UNIX system and a i486 DX2/80 PC at home, but what fun is there in sitting around the house on my weekends off from work (a.k.a. "the real job")?  It is in this frame of mind that over the last year or so I have bought and returned many a PDA and Palmtop (I have a nice credit card company and the fact that my girlfriend works for RadioShack doesn't hurt either!) including a Tandy Zoomer, a Sharp Zaurus, a Sony Magic Link, and a Psion.

The only PDA I haven't touched is the Newton (made, of course, by Apple... need I say more?).  So, why did I finally select the Hewlett-Packard 200LX over all others?

The Operating System

This is probably the most important reason I stayed with the HP 200LX.

All of the other systems listed above use their own proprietary OS which severely limits the unit's flexibility and software accessibility.  The 200LX runs on MS-DOS 5.0 which gives it access to the largest software library in the world.  Anything that can run on MS-DOS 5.0 and within 600 kB of RAM can run on the 200LX.

Software Availability

As I pointed out above, the only limitations on what can run off of an 200LX are the DOS version, available memory, and possibly the processor (a 188C which is equivalent to an IBM XT) and disk space.

For example, on my Palmtop (equipped with a 6 MB flash RAM PCMCIA card) I normally carry my Watcom C++ compiler and linker for down-and-dirty trenches hard-coding, a Telnet program, an offline news reader, uuencode, PKZIP, dos2unix text file converter, a MIME encoder/decoder, PGP, a DTMF program, a program that stores IR signals as binary and can resend them (great fun at those boring departmental show and tell meetings!), and a few other basic necessities.

Other PDA operating systems may have SDKs available, but the amount of available software for them will never match DOS.

Built-In Software

Not quite as important as the operating system or availability of software but important nonetheless is what applications are built in.

Of course the 200LX comes with your standard array of PDA software (Quicken, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus cc:Mail, HP Calculator, a notepad, an address book, and an appointment calendar) but, in addition, it is equipped with a surprisingly powerful flat-file database application which can be made relational through the use of the 200LX native macro language, a wonderful terminal program with VT100 and ANSI emulation along with all of the regular transfer protocols (XMODEM, ZmODEM, Binary, Kermit, etc.), and Laplink.  Since all of this software is run off of ROM it executes blazingly fast.

Expandability

While most PDAs and Palmtop PCMCIA slots are limited to flash RAM, SRAM, and modems, the 200LX allows use of virtually any PCMCIA version 2 cards including flash RAM (currently up to 80 MB), modems (up to 28.8 kbps, including cellular), Token Ring, even SCSI!

As long as there is a DOS driver for it, it'll work.  The 200LX also includes a serial port (COM1), and an IR port.  The serial port can be used with any standard serial device.  All of this makes the expandability of the 200LX rival that of a laptop for only 6 oz. and $1500 less.

Battery Life

Time to change the 2 AA batteries again?  But it's only been 2 months!!!

I think I've made my point here.  For hackers like me who are on the move a lot and don't want to be bothered with carrying pounds of laptop equipment or are on a low-level drone programmer's salary the Hewlett-Packard 200LX is a great machine to have.

You will have to excuse me now - AOL must pay dearly for kicking me off their system.  Lucky I have a database of international Sprintnet access numbers in my Palmtop, huh?