Fun with DOS (!)

I found a spare 64mb CF card knocking about and found that it fitted into the 200LX with a PCMCIA adapter. Tiny by modern standards but respectable for a DOS machine. In a search for something to run on it, I found a copy of Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS. I was able to decompress it on XP and run the setup program, and then copied the final folder to the palmtop. Amazingly enough it works fine, once the colours were set so the mono LCD could display them properly.

The truly scary thing is that the entire program takes up just 2.6mb. It seems unreal somehow that we used to be able to get by on such tiny resources.

The 200LX is one of those machines I find really interesting because it was an attempt to compress a desktop architecture into a palmtop. It's quite unusual because it actually worked, and was a really good machine, made when HP still made interesting things of good quality. The modern equivalent is probably the OQO or the Sony Vaio UX, which are handheld machines that can run full copies of XP or Linux or even Mac OS X.