HP 200LX

7owners with an opinion

83%of verdicts positive

3/1positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and ease of use; criticized for value and display.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it

I considered buying one of these at the time (as a happy HP 32S calculator user) but after playing with a colleague's one I decided not to bother. It was neat but there were so many compromises and inconveniences that it made the thing difficult at best so I figured I'd leave it a few years to see what happened. My colleague, after the initial amazed and shiny period wore off, just used it as a terminal for futzing with routers with in the end. This was a pretty expensive solution because we already had piles of old Wyse terminals floating around unused.

Likes it

The OP says the machine was 'slow' -- however, getting the 2x clock upgrade, the machine's dhrystone performance is 1.5 VAX MIPS. That's not 'terrible'. It's like having a VAX-11/785 in your pocket that runs on 2 AA batteries. Mine runs the 16 bit MS C compiler, MASM, all manner of DOS programs (it's DOS 5.0), and the built-in apps are really quite good; 123 is particularly well done, and the calc app is, as expected, superb (has about half a dozen different 'modes' for Sci, Eng, TVM, etc). Auto-backed up every night, to an SRAM card in the PCMCIA slot. Full RS-232 Serial Port - this is one of the main ways one connected it to modems (although PCMCIA modem cards existed). And it had the very first IrDA port; 115,200 bps. I have mine right underneath my computer monitor, and use it many times per day. It's just more useful with a keyboard than these screens with virtual keyboards for the engineering stuff I do. If it would have, say, bluetooth to the smart phone that I could use as an internet gateway, and if it had a backlight -- getting close to perfection as a portable productivity device.

Likes it

I loved my 200LX. The SSD-like i/o performance, excellent keyboard, and the superior utility of text-based software made it a dream. I rewrote in ‘C’ a FileMaker Pro configuration and quotation application my company used, and ran it on the 200LX. I could finish a quote for a customer in the time it took my colleagues to start up Filemaker. Two of them bought their own 200LXes, and we had an under-the-corporate-radar efficiency boost going on for about a year :-)

Likes it

I was strangely obsessed with computing on the go for quite a long time. The HP 200LX was one of the steps on my journey. At the time, I was able to get this really cut-down real-mode version of Linux running on it. I was rather happy with being able to get 'vi' running and being able to program directly on it. I didn't end up doing much actual programming on it while sitting under a tree on a breezy summer day though. Later on I would experiment with running a full Linux userspace on Android phones that had decent keyboards (the original G1 / ADP1 and the Samsung Sidekick 4G).

Likes it

Maybe not 8-bit, but my HP 200LX runs months on 2 AAs and is only moderately bulkier (thicker) than a modern smartphone. With a CF card you can have hundreds of excellent DOS programs/games on it.

Neutral

For what it's worth, I've used a HP 200LX to confirm that some undocumented details (found by disassembling microcode) work as expected: REP BOUND only compares against lower bound REP MUL result in AH (byte) or SP (word) REP IMUL result in CH (byte) or BP (word) REP IMUL reg,r/m,i16 first operand ignored, 32 bit result in DX:AX REP IMUL reg,r/m,i8 first op ign., AH=result bit 23..16, AL=bit 7..0 AAM 00H no "divide by zero" exception, AH=FFh, AL unchanged So it's certainly based on the 80186 microcode, as none of these instructions do the same on any other x86 chip.

Likes it

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.

Likes itStill going

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.