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Home▸ Forums▸ 68kMLA▸ One of the first netbooks ever... AST Ascentia M-series — #17
Post #17 by ClassicHasClass
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryHardware
Post DateThu, 7 Jan 2010 - 04:26
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/one-of-the-first-netbooks-ever-ast-ascentia-m-series.19498/
Post
The OmniBook 300s are beautiful. Never been able to land one.
I do have a OmniGo 700LX, but no phone for it, of course. I used a 95LX for a long time. A delightful little unit.
Yeah, I had a 200LX, and now really wish I had kept it. I bought it when I was in college in '94 or '95; and did all sorts of crazy things on it. I ran Windows 3.0; I played Microsoft Flight Sim; I even put a FORTRAN compiler on, because it was faster to just compile on the little 80186 than it was to wait for the network-share compiler to become available. (Lab of 30-40 computers, only 5 compiler licenses, so they had a system where it would queue up your compile request. About once a week, the queue would break, and it wouldn't compile *ANYONE*s project until an admin logged in and fixed it.)
I built apps on Turbo Pascal on a 486 I had (and still, as it happens, have) and transferred them over to it, games and such mostly. I also plugged it into a modem to dial in with the terminal emulator when I was out and about. The only downer with the 95LX was the small screen width, but it was a lot more convenient than the Atari Portfolio. I have a Portfolio, mostly as a curiosity, and on balance the LXen are the better machines even though Portfolios are really quite sexy.

When I lived in Malaysia for a few weeks, one of the doctors at the hospital there was practically conjoined to his 100LX. He did remarkable things with it.

I'm pretty sure I picked up the GEOS OmniGo too (OmniGo 100, IIRC?). I was not a fan of GEOS on the C64 or the Apple II, just too slow for practical use. But GEOS on the OmniGo was a surprising pleasure. And there is a ZEOS pocket PC (cheap piece of ...) and a Poqet PC around here somewhere also, but the LXen are my favourites.

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