The HP 200 LX was a successful palmtop computer introduced in 1994. HP continued to sell it through 1999, an unusually long run for a 1990s computer model. In this blog post, we’ll dig into this largely forgotten form factor and why it became such a quiet success.
Dave Farquhar
These devices are incredibly cool, but I disagree that they disappeared, as the blog post states. Just recently I reviewed my main laptop, a very small Chuwi MiniBook (2023) with the N100, and in that article I also listed some other similar options that are still being made and sold today, from companies like GPD and OneNetbook.
From the article “I remember people showing off their Apple Newtons, Palm Pilots, and Blackberries in the 90s. I do not remember ever seeing someone showing off an HP palmtop. One speculation I’ve heard is that large companies bought them for their employees in large quantities. That seems plausible”
I worked at a company called “Pi Research” back in the early 90’s and we used these to run our data analysis software. They were a lot slower than the 80386 and (gasp!) 80486’s that were emerging but they could display data, run basic analytics and *really importantly* people could easily carry the device around and show their analysis to other people immediately. Pretty sweet little device.