This brings back memories. I worked at the HP manufacturing plant in Corvallis, Oregon back in the mid-90s. When I started, the OmniBook 600 series was in full swing. One night we got a bunch of new parts for a new system - the 800 series. I’m going from memory here, but I think we built 16 units from start to finish. Of those, 10 were still working at the end of the manufacturing process. Those 10 went into a burn-in chamber where they were subjected to temperature and humidity changes. After 24 hours, only five of them were still alive. We put them on a cart and as we were wheeling them back to the engineering team, the remaining five stopped working. So, yeah. For the prototypes, it was a 100% failure rate. The engineers worked out the bugs and we built a bunch more. I had the pleasure of testing some of the first production units. And yes, we tested them by playing Duke Nuke’em 3d for hours on end.

That's a shockingly good LCD for 1997. Nice and bright, and barely a hint of ghosting to be found.

I miss the days when you'd see a single laptop per year and it would blow your mind

I'm such a sucker for laptops. The barcode at 2:12 reads "hugefarts", if anyone was wondering. Stay classy, Clint.

Ohhh yeah, I wanted a tiny portable so badly as a kid, even though we couldn't really afford or justify one of any size. That pop-out... Mouse? Is fascinating

Videos like this really underline how much money my family would spend on laptops in the 90s and early 2000s, and how brave they were to let any child within 10 feet of something that cost more than a used car.

Oh man my mom worked for HP and had one of these and I messed with it a lot. Had no clue it was so expensive. Played a lot of Solitaire with that little mouse. In retrospect it's a really nice form factor for the time.

That pop out mouse is cool, I wish they still made those. Imagine what we could do with modern technology and an idea like that.

It looks surprisingly modern for a laptop of its age

That mouse... Is one of the most adorable tech things I've ever seen in my entire life.

My Mom was issued one of these by Hewlett-Packard back in the day when she was getting her degree in Computer Science for the company. After the HP/Agilent split, she was able to keep the Omnibook. I used to play Warcraft II and Red Alert on it. I loved the little pop-out mouse.

My first computer! THOUSANDS of these came off lease in 2000, I begged for a computer for my 11th birthday and found a reseller on eBay with hundreds of 800ct's. Computer, docking station, three batteries, cd rom, floppy and maxed out ram for $200. Talk about Moore's law, three years later and these were CHEAP. Mine was the 133 non mmx, but it was totally fine. Popped a desktop 56k modem into the docking station (it took one full size card) and spent years on the palace and even the beginning RuneScape. It was horrible for that lol. My main board died but last year I was able to get a replacement computer from the omnibooks store on eBay. Guy is a godsend, he has everything. Ironically, found out he may have been the guy I got it from originally! It's amazing how quickly laptops depreciated. Three years old and I got an entire maxed out system for peanuts. Also, the batteries still work!

Great video. Used to work for HP and surely can confirm what you're assuming at 9:00 about the computer belonging earlier to HP. That bunch of COE named folders was the stuff they pushed for all their managed laptops before Compaq merger.

The tiny mouse is so cool! I love that the button for it is the little cartoon mouse, it's adorable. Guess even for a business computer they could have a little whimsy, rather than it just saying "mouse" or showing an actual computer mouse or something.

I just love this form factor. Most people nowadays dont understand. They say: just buy a tablet with a keyboard, but it's not the same thing!

Crazy prices, I struggled to find a laptop that was $9000 in today's marketplace. Heck, i looked at an Acer gaming laptop in the mid-2000s and that was only $3000, which was still premium priced but already $1750 less not even a decade later

Any device from any era with a button that, upon pressing, shoots out a peripheral is 10 out of 10 in my book. I really loved the pop-out CD drives back in the day.

Love that the barcode at 2:13 says hugefarts, keepin it classy Clint. 👍

I am once again thanking you for keeping up with subtitles on your content. It's so rare to have KZfaq videos with subtitles these days

LGR on a Friday morning makes for a GREAT day! Thanks Clint!

Amaaazing. My dad worked for HP and saved one from from the e-waste pile, and daily drove it for a while. The pop out mouse was a buck-wild design and worked pretty well

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.

0:46 Stunning reading how many fundamental features of Office came with '97! Almost as is competition in that space made things better... though that VB and Outlook integration were, obviously, designed to create incompatibilities with other vendors' software.

This mouse mechanism is a cunning solution I would love to see today again! Also note these cute little details that they actually really put a mouse icon there. This display also seems to have aged well.

This was really enjoyable to watch . Very impressed with the performance of the laptop .

I think LGR is the most relaxing and calm retro tech reviewer, these videos are the type of videos to fall asleep to.

I about jumped out of my chair when you launched POD. It was one of my first games. I think I still have it on CD somewhere... Thanks a lot, now I'm going to be digging through the basement

I worked in omnibook support @ HP for almost 10 years during this period. That in built mouse was always my favourite. The support 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.

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.

I’ve been curious about this laptop for ages, i’m so happy to see you cover it!

13:32 excellent channeling of early 70s Doctor Who sound and visual there! Decent laptop for its era when there were plenty of cheap inferior products out there ready to dupe the uninformed. I really liked the pop-out mouse too, never seen that before. Great work as ever Clint 👍

2:13 I know Clint must of had a lot of fun making those ID Cards.

My mother had one of these when she worked for HP. It was fking awesome. I recall the cool mouse widget needing regular replacement.

Jesus... those prices... When it comes to power to cost ratio... my Alienware X17 R2 would have cost only about $1,500 in 97. Shows just how much costs have come down and power has soared. I can only imagine what would have to be in my laptop for it to cost over $9,000. IT'S OVER 9000! lol

Clint it's so refreshing to see this HP OmniBook 800CT , These were Newish when I worked in the PC Repair shop , I remember using one to Travel and Use MSN Messenger from a Hotel Room in Texas in 2000 on Dialup and was able to keep up with my friend who was on a Wifi connection and He was Impressed that Computer could do what it did and it even did Video , the frame rate was lousy but the commuters round it down to the slowest connection , What a joy to Use :) QC

05:00 this mouse boggles my mind. Such a cool feature

Thanks for including metric units as well 🤗 Greetings from Europe!

Always love your videos about old PCs and laptops, Mr. Clint. It makes me better about my own 7yo craptop lmao. Jokes aside though, genuinely love these. Thank you.

I remember this as a kid in the 90s. This was the Lamborghini of laptops.

I have one of these, I also have the docking station which has an ISA/PCI slot in it. Interested to watch the rest of the video, only a couple mins in so far!

The Barcode on your badge reading "hugefarts" was a nice touch!

I love that little pop-out mouse. I wish they still made those, I hate track-pads.

Bless you sir for continuing with this content. It really has a charm that's been lost across most of KZfaq. Much love, thanks for the hundreds of hours of free entertainment!

Can confirm I was a corporate customer of these machines in that era. (We went with Toshiba) Those laptops were still rare (every kid having one in a backpack was not the case), and considered state of the art computing.

Man these were fun, we would sneak disks in and install shareware on them. Loved the keyboards on them! Also shoutouts to HP for actually filling out their DMI tables back then.

Always loved reviews of these ridiculously priced notebooks from 90s 👍

As a kid, I prayed for a tiny portable I could play with all the time. I got one, but it wasn't what I expected.

Eyy I had one of these. I got it from a ham radio swap meet, long after it was obsolete in the late 00s. Amazingly the battery was still good. I even got the external CD drive. I was the only kid in high school with a laptop. Loved the thing, especially the little mouse. Really cleverly designed. The bar has conductive stripes embedded in it like a digital caliper does. As the bar slides in and out there's an inductive pickup that runs the x axis and buttons. The y axis is a similar system on an internal cradle pushed up and down by the bar. Therefore there's no direct electrical connection to the mouse. I had installed Damn Small Linux on it so I could do modern-ish things on it. I noticed the bad scaling at the time as well, me and my friends said it went beyond pixelated, we called it "blockulated." It even briefly controlled the school woodshop's CNC router. Thanks for the memories!

it's such a pleasant looking thing. It really does help how much of the lid the screen takes up, makes it look just that bit cleaner.

My father worked at Raytheon in the late 90's and he was given a company laptop. I couldn't tell you what brand it was or what specs it had, but I distinctly remember it being several inches thick and him telling me it was worth about $3800 at the time. Naturally, I begged him to let me install my Hot Wheels: Stunt Track Driver game onto it so I could play a computer game on the couch. That laptop is probably long, long gone, but that Hot Wheels game disc still works on Windows 10 today :)

i love this form factor for laptops. it just looks so dense and well designed.

I have absolutely no interest in technology but this guy's videos are so cool and chill I just relax and watch them with no idea what he's talking about

Since 2012 I've always enjoyed these videos of super-laptops from yesteryear.

I made a ridiculous girly high-pitched noise when the tiny mouse popped out

16:50 your parody voice of Duke Nukem is a pure gold!

"Corpo"; love that expression! And I agree, the Omnibook is delightful! There's just something about tiny vintage laptops. Thanks for covering this in your usual thorough and delightful fashion!

My very first laptop was a second-hand Toshiba Libretto 100ct with maxed-out RAM and 8.4gb HDD in 2002 - and I overclocked the Pentium 166 to 233mhz too. This HP clearly has a better screen and keyboard but I really loved the screenside-located pointing device in the Toshiba. I'll always have a soft spot for early subnotebooks!

The AOL mouse pad with emoji guide is excellent! What a funny relic!

this design is very cute, absolutely love it. very cool little machine overall

I really miss Windows 95's pixelated UI. The visuals were so simplistic but so effective in conveying whatever message they needed to. Plus the icon design was top notch.

damn that thing is cool as hell, and its in such great condition with all those peripherals?? great find.

I remember when my dad brought home his ThinkPad's from work in the mid 90's and he would let me mess with them, and this computer/video brings back memories of my first experiences with laptops.

I'm watching this on basically the modern version of this laptop! This is such a cool form factor in both retro and modern computers.

At this point in my life I was trying to get XFree86 configured and get X to start. It took me a couple of years. Ahh Slackware.

I remember this being on display in Microcenter when I was a kid. There was a smaller laptop next to it, but I have never been able to find out what it was, despite extensive research.

love that you can see it's usage miles by the thumb rubbing off the Win95 sticker, i guess it's where the thumb would be if you were to move the laptop a bit or adjusting the angle on screen

Hoo boy, that's over $9,100 in today's money... EDIT: Should have kept watching before commenting, lol. Anyway, as always thanks for the fascinating blast from the past!

The keyboard color scheme is sick af.

Thank you for blessing us with another strange subnotebook video

Might be born on 2006 but 90s tech is interesting and fascinating. Good job, Clint!

used to buy them up and upgrade, minor repairs, on them back in 2006 or so when these were unloaded on fleabay for dirt cheap but still had usable life in them for real work to be done.

In case you were wondering, the barcode on Clint’s ID at 2:24 is a Code 128 barcode and it reads “hugefarts” 😂

As someone who came from this era, that's why my current main computer is a GPD WIN MAX 2. 32gb ram + 6TB SSD in something slightly larger than a tablet. I love having a full power computer in such a tiny form factor.

Working for Business Farts AND for IBM? A true road warrior, Clint.

My dad had one of these. For what it was, it was very well built. It's also the laptop i played a game on that i can't find anymore, yet have very fond memories of. Having Aphantasia... i can't even remember what it was like. I just "remember" i loved that game, especially the starting sequence with the main menu. Weird, ain't it? :))

I love the form factor of a 10 inch laptop. Thank god for GPD still making powerful ones!

Love your content! and thanks for helping Adrian!

I wanted one of these so bad in 1997. I ended up with a Compaq Aero 486/33 instead. It wasn't nearly as fast, but it was about the same size and had great battery life.

Oh my. When you pulled that strip of icons out. What an amazing idea.

I used to work as a repair engineer (supporting hp repair lines & contractors) for HP at the time. I supported the 800, 2000, 3000 and 5700 series (all from the same era). Brings back memories to see a 800 still in good shape and running perfectly. I might still have one in the attic... I shoud take a look sometimes.

this is tech pron, you get the smooth loosy goosy feeling when you watch it. Would like to own one of those laptops.

This was actually my 2nd laptop. My first was the Omnibook 300, monochrome 386. I loved the little pop out mouse, but I was a kid back then. I remember hooking it up to my external Zoom 14.4 modem and downloading all the floppies for RedHat 4.2. I got it installed and working along with a copy of Applixware that I installed and used for the remainder of high school. I had no idea how lucky I was to have a Dad that enabled and encouraged me to be a computer nerd. Thanks for covering this one, it brought back a ton of memories for me.

I really chuckled at the barcode in 2:15, that says "hugefarts"! This is the kind of easter egg I wanted to find

That mouse looks gimmicky, but fabulous! What a great idea! An X Y belt drive? Awesome. I love these little 90's note books, and I love LGR coverage of them. Great stuff.

I owned one of these, and used it for about ten years. I loved the thing. I still have it, and it still works, provided you can get power to it (the cable on the power brick is broken). I can't remember who was offering the deal or exactly when I got it, but in the mid- to late- 1990's I picked one up along with the "docking station" for a total of about $1600.00 new. Things to notice: - The LCD display, for its time, was wonderful. All the other "affordable" laptop of the time were either using older monochrome displays, or ridiculously smear-y DSTN displays. The 800CT's TFT display was high-contrast, bright, and clear. - The display hinge -- You know how, on most laptops when you tilt the screen to a preferred angle, it bounces back a little, so you have to over-push it a bit to get it where you want. Not so on the 800CT. You tilted the display, took your hand off it, and it *_stayed there._* A marvel of mechanical engineering. (This was down to some clever hardware inside the pivots, which the designers called a clutch.) - The pop-out mouse is _completely passive._ There are no electronics to burn out or wires to break. A signal is capacitively induced into traces on the mouse arm, which is then detected by sensors inside the laptop that sense the arm's position. - The laptop uses static memory (as opposed to the dynamic RAM of modern systems). Though far more expensive and less dense, they chose this kind of RAM to extend battery life. I've left the thing in suspend mode for three *_weeks_* and come back to find it picking up right where it left off. - At the time, most PCs were using IDE for hard drives. But there weren't (yet) any IDE CD-ROM drives. So, the 800CT has a built-in SCSI controller. And, as I was an Amiga user who had a bunch of old SCSI drives layout around, and kept using SCSI until SATA came out, this worked great. My machine never ran Windows -- it was obliterated in favor of Linux (2.x kernel series). The reverse-engineered driver for the Neomagic graphics controller worked well enough. Although the internal speaker was anemic, the headphone jack worked great. This was an absolutely beautiful machine.

That sweater you are wearing looks so hecccing comfy!

6:42 lmfao that businessman is like the OG chad meme with all the pointers 😂

You found a gem there Clint! I remember these, my uncle had one and I specifically remember the mouse that popped out. Genius! All these years later, leave it to you to do an excellent video on it!! Thank you kind sir!

That thing looks amazing! I would buy a modern laptop if it looked like this.

Impressive panel, and ES18xx audio chipset for really great SB compatibility and audio quality, impressive for a business machine for sure! ^^

Bro, seeing Tyrian 2000 unlocked an entite sector of my memories that i had long forgotten. For years I've had vague memories of a vertical scroll shooter i played as a kid, but could never remember the name. This is that game! Unreal man, thank you for solving this mystery for me!!

the pop out mouse is the coolest bit of oddware I've seen

Wow, I've used trackballs, trackpoints and trackpads in the 90s, but never this dangling mouse-like non-mouse thingy used here. Now I have to try it!

I grabbed one of these very things very recently and haven't even gotten around to playing with it yet; thanks for reminding me

As a lover of little bitty laptops, I have lusted after one of these since they came out. Great coverage, as always!

@2:23 I knew there had to be something hiding in that barcode and I was not disappointed.

2:25 Clint, with all the wonderful videos and the hard work you put in, I always knew you were Some Guy.

That popout mouse really got me.

Really glad I held onto my 800CT - I used it a lot when I was in the Air Force in the early 2000's

Imagine having that FIFA 98 on your office back on 97... geez, you would be the god damn king!