A New Retro Computer on the Way

Friday, 11th September 2015

Today I ordered a computer I've been wanting for a long time.  I saw a Hewlett-Packard 100LX on eBay for a reasonable price, and have a bit of cash to spare.  I would be silly not to take advantage of such good luck!

The HP 100LX is full DOS-compatible PC that fits into a jacket pocket.  Launched in 1993, its specification is similar to full-sized PCs of the mid-to-late 1980s.  It has 1MB RAM (640K usable as DOS RAM while the remainder becomes a RAM disk).  It can take a PCMCIA card for extra storage, or a CF card using an adapter.  It has CGA graphics, which are stretched on its letterbox-format screen but still useable.  And it has an 80186 processor running at just short of 8 MHz.  That makes it similar to many of the PCs I used at college in the early 1990s.

I'm not altogether certain what I'll use it for.  Almost certainly I'll be putting onto it all those games that entertained me on similarly-specced machines during my college years: Prince of Persia, Stunts, Elite and the like.  But given that I like programming on the move, I can see myself installing a C compiler and doing some development on it too.