4, 750 Laptop From 1997: HP OmniBook 800CT
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Date: 2023-10-14
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Comments and reviews: 20
Karl
HP was not focused at this time at selling these laptops to small businesses and consumers. The Omnibook line at this time was being marketed to big corporations and such. I remember hearing the marketing and finance guys talking about companies like lufthansa being the big buyers of these. This was waaaaayyyyy before the big sale at walmart after turkey-day which a little later was one of the traditional big sales bumps for HP printers and computers. So while the price was (ridiculously) high you were not the person they were likely selling to. The Omnibook 5700 which you show was actually in my experience a piece of crap. That whole series was kind of terrible. I believe the first of that series was the 3000 which I can't remember weather that was an internal model number or one which they actually sold under either way the machines are kind of garbage. I believe the codename internal for the 800 was Orion and the 600 was Paramount. Useless trivia.
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HP was not focused at this time at selling these laptops to small businesses and consumers. The Omnibook line at this time was being marketed to big corporations and such. I remember hearing the marketing and finance guys talking about companies like lufthansa being the big buyers of these. This was waaaaayyyyy before the big sale at walmart after turkey-day which a little later was one of the traditional big sales bumps for HP printers and computers. So while the price was (ridiculously) high you were not the person they were likely selling to. The Omnibook 5700 which you show was actually in my experience a piece of crap. That whole series was kind of terrible. I believe the first of that series was the 3000 which I can't remember weather that was an internal model number or one which they actually sold under either way the machines are kind of garbage. I believe the codename internal for the 800 was Orion and the 600 was Paramount. Useless trivia.
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f rste
Had an earlier Omnibook in the 400-series. Really innovative, 3 pounds and only non backlit grayscale LCD and only PCMCIA disk space so a really early SSD -PC. Ran a whole day on 4 AA batteries and the pop out mouse is the best solution yet for this form factor. Worked much better than the IBM trackpoint and no room for a trackpad on this PC. Only mouse ever usable on a small table on an airplane or train. The big disadvantages of the 400-series were no VGA and an early version of the (4) PCMCIA cards which made them incompatible with most cards. And HP (as usual) never came out with an upgrade for the PCMCIA drivers.
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Had an earlier Omnibook in the 400-series. Really innovative, 3 pounds and only non backlit grayscale LCD and only PCMCIA disk space so a really early SSD -PC. Ran a whole day on 4 AA batteries and the pop out mouse is the best solution yet for this form factor. Worked much better than the IBM trackpoint and no room for a trackpad on this PC. Only mouse ever usable on a small table on an airplane or train. The big disadvantages of the 400-series were no VGA and an early version of the (4) PCMCIA cards which made them incompatible with most cards. And HP (as usual) never came out with an upgrade for the PCMCIA drivers.
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psionski
From reading the comments, it seems your best chance of having played around with one of these is your mom working at HP, or, occasionally, your dad working at HP But, at least as of 6-7 years ago when I left the company, can confirm they were REALLY generous when it came to equipping their employees. If you can justify why a dual-socket Xeon workstation will help you in your work, you get a dual-socket Xeon workstation, no fuss no muss. Same with software licenses. Just top of the line best tools you could ever ask for, price be damned. If they were as generous with the salaries, I'd probably still be working there
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From reading the comments, it seems your best chance of having played around with one of these is your mom working at HP, or, occasionally, your dad working at HP But, at least as of 6-7 years ago when I left the company, can confirm they were REALLY generous when it came to equipping their employees. If you can justify why a dual-socket Xeon workstation will help you in your work, you get a dual-socket Xeon workstation, no fuss no muss. Same with software licenses. Just top of the line best tools you could ever ask for, price be damned. If they were as generous with the salaries, I'd probably still be working there
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Karl
I worked for HP at the factory that built those laptops when they were building that particular model. The speaker always sucked. The model you are showing is DEFINITELY used by an employee. ALL those start menu items with the COE prefix are a corporate installed package used internally by HP. I believe most folks upgraded these to Win 98 SE when it was available. IF I recall correctly these had PCMCIA hard drives. The 300s and 425s did. Those 3com PCMCIA net cards were okay but the dongles kind of sucked and got broken A LOT. The better card was the XIRCOM RE and RBE series which were dongle less.
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I worked for HP at the factory that built those laptops when they were building that particular model. The speaker always sucked. The model you are showing is DEFINITELY used by an employee. ALL those start menu items with the COE prefix are a corporate installed package used internally by HP. I believe most folks upgraded these to Win 98 SE when it was available. IF I recall correctly these had PCMCIA hard drives. The 300s and 425s did. Those 3com PCMCIA net cards were okay but the dongles kind of sucked and got broken A LOT. The better card was the XIRCOM RE and RBE series which were dongle less.
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Paul
Two II one / III PCMCIA in a laptop that size in that era really helps make it top tier. While that configuration was standard on fullsize laptops, many smaller ones went with a single slot, or rarely none at all. It really sucked to have to choose the ONE card you wanted to use, especially when a reboot was best practice when changing devices (hot-swap was supported, but the more you swapped, the more drivers were going in and out of memory, and the less stable windows would become. Why risk courting a crash. Anyway, two slots with all those ports really was nice at that size.
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Two II one / III PCMCIA in a laptop that size in that era really helps make it top tier. While that configuration was standard on fullsize laptops, many smaller ones went with a single slot, or rarely none at all. It really sucked to have to choose the ONE card you wanted to use, especially when a reboot was best practice when changing devices (hot-swap was supported, but the more you swapped, the more drivers were going in and out of memory, and the less stable windows would become. Why risk courting a crash. Anyway, two slots with all those ports really was nice at that size.
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Bill
I loved these laptops. The pop out mouse worked really well. Our executives liked these or the Compaq 4/75 CXLs because they had a cool motorized dock, trackball near the screen and reliable as a freight train. These omnibooks were pretty cool. There was another made by DEC, I think, that had expansion shims you could add to the bottom. If you wanted a cd player, or extra battery, you'd buy the shim and add it on. Think it was a DEC HiNote Ultra. Clint, if you find one of those, it would be a cool review.
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I loved these laptops. The pop out mouse worked really well. Our executives liked these or the Compaq 4/75 CXLs because they had a cool motorized dock, trackball near the screen and reliable as a freight train. These omnibooks were pretty cool. There was another made by DEC, I think, that had expansion shims you could add to the bottom. If you wanted a cd player, or extra battery, you'd buy the shim and add it on. Think it was a DEC HiNote Ultra. Clint, if you find one of those, it would be a cool review.
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Miwna
Such an interesting little powerhouse of a laptop. I don't remember where I got it from but I have a 600CT lying around which I think came out a few years before the 800. Though the mouse is present, sadly, for some reason someone has cut it off. I've never had a charger for it so I don't know if it works. I don't know what do with it but you can have it if you want. Also, lovely to see you play FIFA 98. One of the few games I still have in its original big box.
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Such an interesting little powerhouse of a laptop. I don't remember where I got it from but I have a 600CT lying around which I think came out a few years before the 800. Though the mouse is present, sadly, for some reason someone has cut it off. I've never had a charger for it so I don't know if it works. I don't know what do with it but you can have it if you want. Also, lovely to see you play FIFA 98. One of the few games I still have in its original big box.
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Tox
I have one, bought for 2 off eBay in 2019: D It's even stranger: it doesn't have an internal backup battery, instead it has 3 supercapacitors for keeping clock and settings during battery changes (mine were dead and slightly leaking, other than that it has only solid capacitors. And it has a SCSI controller for external drives, I have the original HP cdrom drive which is SCSI (and also works as a standalone audio cd player)
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I have one, bought for 2 off eBay in 2019: D It's even stranger: it doesn't have an internal backup battery, instead it has 3 supercapacitors for keeping clock and settings during battery changes (mine were dead and slightly leaking, other than that it has only solid capacitors. And it has a SCSI controller for external drives, I have the original HP cdrom drive which is SCSI (and also works as a standalone audio cd player)
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Bret s
At 7: 22, when playing the sound from the Windows 95 boot up, I wonder if that computer has a proper sound card at all. On my Gateway 2000 P5-100, there is a driver included that allows audio samples and sound card emulation to be sent to the PC speaker. The crackling and audio quality in this HP laptop sounds exactly like it s coming out of the PC speaker using a similar or the same sound card emulation driver I have.
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At 7: 22, when playing the sound from the Windows 95 boot up, I wonder if that computer has a proper sound card at all. On my Gateway 2000 P5-100, there is a driver included that allows audio samples and sound card emulation to be sent to the PC speaker. The crackling and audio quality in this HP laptop sounds exactly like it s coming out of the PC speaker using a similar or the same sound card emulation driver I have.
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J rg
This is a real nice Laptop I bought one used in 2001 with a Pentium 133. There is one thing you did not mention which is quite unique. It has a real SCSI bus connector. The adapter cable is shown in the Video. With this you could connect any kind of SCSI peripheral like CD-Rom or even HDD. There was even a special external portable SCSI CD-Rom for this machine you could use with AA batteries as a Discman.
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This is a real nice Laptop I bought one used in 2001 with a Pentium 133. There is one thing you did not mention which is quite unique. It has a real SCSI bus connector. The adapter cable is shown in the Video. With this you could connect any kind of SCSI peripheral like CD-Rom or even HDD. There was even a special external portable SCSI CD-Rom for this machine you could use with AA batteries as a Discman.
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Vardek
EVERY kid in my school got one of those Omnibooks, they issued around a thousand of them. Great fun to play NES and SEGA games on. They ran BeOS great, so it was not locked down to the shitty HP windows distro that had everything disabled. They had some kind of switch preventing reinstall with DOS and Windows, thus every kid ran BeOS bakc in school, since then you could do anything.
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EVERY kid in my school got one of those Omnibooks, they issued around a thousand of them. Great fun to play NES and SEGA games on. They ran BeOS great, so it was not locked down to the shitty HP windows distro that had everything disabled. They had some kind of switch preventing reinstall with DOS and Windows, thus every kid ran BeOS bakc in school, since then you could do anything.
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Rajel
daily drove one of these things for a while!
that mouse is certainly something to get used to, and was employed along the entire range of Omnibooks up to that point!
it's unfortunate the SCSI controller doesn't have DMA support, any transfers beat the heck out of the CPU making it quite slow when reading or writing to an external drive such as a CD-ROM or zip/jaz drive.
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daily drove one of these things for a while!
that mouse is certainly something to get used to, and was employed along the entire range of Omnibooks up to that point!
it's unfortunate the SCSI controller doesn't have DMA support, any transfers beat the heck out of the CPU making it quite slow when reading or writing to an external drive such as a CD-ROM or zip/jaz drive.
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Andrew
Back in 99 my HS got T-5 high speed internet which till this day is nothing to wag a finger at. I downloaded the Matrix off a website I found on weird pier in what seemed like a blink of an eye. It actually took a lot longer to burn
it on to a CD-rom. Not the greatest resolution but I was used to waiting over an hour to download a 4 minute song off napstet at home
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Back in 99 my HS got T-5 high speed internet which till this day is nothing to wag a finger at. I downloaded the Matrix off a website I found on weird pier in what seemed like a blink of an eye. It actually took a lot longer to burn
it on to a CD-rom. Not the greatest resolution but I was used to waiting over an hour to download a 4 minute song off napstet at home
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Charles
Clint, have you thought about doing an entire LGR Blurb or anything just only doing the voice of Duke Nukem? Maybe a look at, say, how Raze has matured as a Build engine sourceport for modern systems since its initial debut? (I guess that's tangentially related to the focus on LGR) You're just so damn good at replicating Jon St. John's delivery, it kills me.
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Clint, have you thought about doing an entire LGR Blurb or anything just only doing the voice of Duke Nukem? Maybe a look at, say, how Raze has matured as a Build engine sourceport for modern systems since its initial debut? (I guess that's tangentially related to the focus on LGR) You're just so damn good at replicating Jon St. John's delivery, it kills me.
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Tyron
I am Going to Dress up as a Computer Hacker like a Dangerous Computer Hacker the Ones that he was Wearing a Face Mask on and Start Saying that he was Going to Rob you and he Was Going to Kill you and Hack your Systems on your Electronic Devices That's the one that He was Saying as and That's the one that I am Going to Dress up as During this Halloween.
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I am Going to Dress up as a Computer Hacker like a Dangerous Computer Hacker the Ones that he was Wearing a Face Mask on and Start Saying that he was Going to Rob you and he Was Going to Kill you and Hack your Systems on your Electronic Devices That's the one that He was Saying as and That's the one that I am Going to Dress up as During this Halloween.
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hak1985org
It blows my mind how LGR can post a video about a given piece of technology like this and instantly drive the market up. Prior to this video, a fully working and loaded deal could be had for about 200 for one of these. Since posting, we re looking at 3x that price for one that s in worse condition. That s the kind of influence our man Clint has!
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It blows my mind how LGR can post a video about a given piece of technology like this and instantly drive the market up. Prior to this video, a fully working and loaded deal could be had for about 200 for one of these. Since posting, we re looking at 3x that price for one that s in worse condition. That s the kind of influence our man Clint has!
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Nik
I worked in omnibook support HP for almost 10 years during this period. That in built mouse was always my favourite. The support of on these was empowered, in the golden era where you could just ship people a replacement part if they wanted to do the repair themselves, or send a technician to them just about anywhere in the world.
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I worked in omnibook support HP for almost 10 years during this period. That in built mouse was always my favourite. The support of on these was empowered, in the golden era where you could just ship people a replacement part if they wanted to do the repair themselves, or send a technician to them just about anywhere in the world.
reply
TheMM360
Cool machine, at the time businessmen loved all those little quirky features for productivity optimization. Then they just used it to play tetris on planes but still. Not the best choice for dos games, considering the specs a 640x480 panel would be much better. Games that support 800x600 are just too much for the system.
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Cool machine, at the time businessmen loved all those little quirky features for productivity optimization. Then they just used it to play tetris on planes but still. Not the best choice for dos games, considering the specs a 640x480 panel would be much better. Games that support 800x600 are just too much for the system.
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Ricardo
I had one of these in the past. I'm not sure if it was the same configuration, as mine was a DSTN display, and I don't remember if it was 486 or pentium, but I clearly remember that it used a special type of HD that died, and I never found a replacement. The HD was something like pCMCIA, it occupied 2 pcmcia slots.
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I had one of these in the past. I'm not sure if it was the same configuration, as mine was a DSTN display, and I don't remember if it was 486 or pentium, but I clearly remember that it used a special type of HD that died, and I never found a replacement. The HD was something like pCMCIA, it occupied 2 pcmcia slots.
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ConvexCheeto
I bought and still own an Omnibook 800CT when I was an HP employee. I got it through the employee purchase program for a few hundred dollars when it was discontinued. It does appear that this was used at HP. COE (Common Operating Environment) was used by HP to deploy apps and tools to company managed PCs.
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I bought and still own an Omnibook 800CT when I was an HP employee. I got it through the employee purchase program for a few hundred dollars when it was discontinued. It does appear that this was used at HP. COE (Common Operating Environment) was used by HP to deploy apps and tools to company managed PCs.
reply
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