HP's Bizarre 90s Collaboration PC
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- čas přidán 30. 01. 2021
- I found this weird piece of collaboration software history in a Computer Chronicles episode, bought the only extant one on eBay and tore it apart as best I could within reason. Enjoy, and maybe experiment with it yourself if you have any ideas!
Disk images: archive.org/details/omnishare
Computer Chronicles ep: archive.org/details/VirtualM
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ko-fi.com/cathoderaydude - Věda a technologie
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i guess "Through the power of buying two of them" is a Technology Connections exclusive
those 2 could've been brothers.
Don't forget Techmoan and his videophone episode
CRD is technology connections but without the annoying voice and the lying
@@AiOinc1 BLASPHEMY
@@AiOinc1 that is a bold claim. good luck finding people who agree
I like how the poor thing is just sitting there doing its best while you're standing across saying "I hate you. Stupid. Awful. Idiot baby computer."
there's no point shaming it if it isn't there to hear it
@@CathodeRayDude oh my god, I love this.
@@CathodeRayDude Ahhhh, memories!
"You can't just buy a 26 year old information appliance with a hard drive in it and just turn it on and expect it to work. Obviously God is going to strike your hard drive dead for your hubris. You have to open it up and take the hard drive out and image it. That's just good stewardship."
Finally, someone who understands my pain
I question the thought process, but I appreciate the care for historical devices.
*POWER THE STYLUS, SHINJI*
Hahahahahahaha!!!! Nice!
SHINJI DON'T DO IT
*_Pathetic._*
Burns down, falls over, sinks into the LCL...
That comment was gold, must go watch the show again now
I absolutely thought that when you filled out the form, that you had written "Catboy Ray Dude"
I'm not quite that spicy
@@CathodeRayDude don't sell yourself short ❤️
😂😅😂
As the former weird kid who used to go to their relatives houses and read their VCR, Microwave and other small appliance manuals cover-to-cover, I feel seen 🤗
I know it's cheating to look back at weird tech things with the clarity of what the following 30 years rolled to be... but this thing just screams to me as being the branchild of a higher up that nobody was allowed to say no to that had a very specific personal problem with faxing that he convinced himself the rest of the world was struggling with as well.
And no board-members who dared to to say "no". Spot on
and honestly this mindset brought us a lot of the crazy things that got released in the old days, but without it we would have had to wait much longer for the walkman
@@Mister_Brown yup all it took was a modifying a professional Sony portable cassette recorder to set off the set of dominoes that is the portable music industry as we know it today. Hell there's a good chance that without that modified professional cassette recorder we wouldn't have the iPod and we wouldn't have the iPod to shape the portable music industry of the 21st century really.
I'm guessing the rubber bit at the bottom was so that the fan that is on the underside doesn't get starved of air if people didnt use the stand
I was thinking the same thing.
Certainly it changes standless mode from overheats-your-machine to merely annoying, but it seems rather intentional that there was just the one awkward rubber foot vs. enough to raise the machine stably...
@@brhfl2812 maybe the SECOND bump fell off before mister ray dude got it
The other reason would be to stabilize the tower with the table it was sitting on. How well could you expect a moving hard drive to write and read if the tower was shaking loosely in its cradle?
@@AuntBibby and HP had an optional two-legged stool you could buy in matching bluish gray...
When you were showing the GUI from the Computer Chronicles episode I was thinking, "Maybe it's a bespoke Motorola 68K machine" and then you said it.
this thing SCREAMS "bespoke motorola 68k machine." i was so disappointed
The only way to get files onto it was to emulate printing with a custom driver. Good god that is sadistic. What a wonderfully obscene product.
I love your channel, thank you so much for sharing such monstrosities with the world!
Was there a way to do the reverse? Could it "print" to the attached PC, or could the attached PC "scan" from this thing?
if your OS already lets you print to file, why in the name of Jobs would it need to be a proprietary format?
When you mentioned that it had a 486, the first thing that came to mind is "it needs to run Doom". If Doom can run on anything, it should be able run on this - maybe there is even a way to make it work with the touchscreen
I was actually thinking of WinDoom when he said he couldn't think of any other high-color Windows apps to run.
Win doom needs win32s to run this device has Windows3.1 embedded on it
I can't believe I spent a minute making you clap by repeatedly pressing 0
czcams.com/video/YnOxTHkHLu4/video.html
congratulations!
Nice! I just had to do this too after seeing your comment.
lmao glad I'm not the only one, i did the blue monday intro and kept it going while singing the tune (or at least, tried to lol)
OMG this is glorius!
I was a freelancer working for IBM during the early 1990's, occasionally doing trade shows. I also worked at trade shows for Microsoft, Lotus and a couple of other companies (in fact, I once met Bill "Money" Gates, and we discussed memory management strategies and the use of ring 0, ring 1, and ring 3 protection in Windows NT and in Microsoft OS/2).
Anyway, I remember demonstrating IBM Person-to-Person version 1.0 for OS/2 at a trade show when it was released, which would have been in 1993, and was in line with the launch of OS/2 2.1.
So, time for me to think back, recall the heady days of youth, wearing a blue double breasted suit, with shoulder pads...
(time warp montage effect)
Oh, Oh, (more wibbly wobbly) oh, OS/2... ah yes. Person 2 Person/2 version 1.0 on Oh Ess Two....
[Accessing suppressed memories - going into a trance ... ]
(cue the sound of the Jackson 5... "ABC... Easy as 123"* ... over and over again...)
I am stood at the IBM stand....
OS/2 2.1 has just been released. It differed from OS/2 2.0 which came with Windows 3.0 subsystem support, having Windows 3.1 support, and the pass through video drivers worked surprisingly well. It also had MMPM/2 1.1 which was the multimedia support for OS/2, which had previously been a separate product.
So as I recall, Person 2 Person leveraged the MMPM/2 subsystem, and it would allow text chat, screen sharing, annotation of documents, and more importantly video conferencing, over a suitably high speed link when paired with an IBM ActionMedia II video capture and encoding card, (the actionmedia II card was quite a monster). It allowed 5 users to cooperate, and given the cost of the hardware you required to make the video side of it work, and the amount of bandwidth used was quite excessive for any wan link at the time, given that it was a point to point system. Every node running video wanted to send and receive from every other node running video.
2 nodes talking sent 1 data channels of video each (2 channels total)
3 nodes talking sent 2 data channels of video each (6 channels total)
4 nodes talking sent 3 data channels of video each (12 channels total)
5 nodes talking sent 4 data channels of video each (20 channels total)
As such, that was the maximum the system dealt with.
I have found a pdf'ed copy of a web page from 1995, listing various multimedia tools
Recent Advances in Networking 1995 Back to Raj Jain's Home Page Last Modified: Aug 28, 1995 saved in around 2000.
www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/cis788-95/ftp/multimedia_prod.pdf
Interestingly, I have found a link where you can pay good money to buy IBM person 2 person ...
www.redcorp.com/en/product/utilities/ibm/person-to-person-os-2-v1-0-53g3997/25302369
Also interestingly, when people thought about buying an actionmedia ii card, the card effectively came with a machine ;)
www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ibm-ps-9576-actionmedia-ii-capture-1876839301
*Lotus Software were usually located near the IBM stand (even prior to them being purchased by IBM, so that IBM could acquire their two main strategic commercial products, which from an IBM perspective were Lotus Notes and CC:Mail) ... because their best known consumer product was Lotus 123 (a spreadsheet, which was actually quite a lot better than Excel) they always played the Jackson 5, "ABC, Easy as 123" on continuous loop, every 5 minutes, until everyone at every other stand lost the will to live, and a brave individual waited until pack away time for the evening and stole the CD, so we had a break the next morning for a few hours....
The ActionMedia card used a graphics chipset and video codecs originally developed at RCA in New Jersey in the mid to late 80s, by the same team that previously created their weird capacitance video disc system.
The chipset was originally intended to go into a home computer system that would display full color graphics and play full motion video from CD, both things that were bleeding edge at the time even in high end systems - I worked on pilot application software for it in my first real job after college.
GE took over RCA and sold the technology to Intel, who moved the development team (including me) to Oregon, and in the 90s migrated the technology into CPUs and operating systems in concert with Microsoft and IBM.
It’s fun to imagine what that RCA home computer would have been like; it definitely would have blown away anything else at the time graphics wise. But it never even came close to being produced; RCA never got any further than that chipset and PC-based development systems which were essentially the alpha version of the ActionMedia boards.
I think the closest the chipset came to being in anything like a home video computer was in some interactive professional training systems, and some bar trivia machines in the UK.
I'm just here for the Evangelion references.
I'm here for all the rest :D
Did he say it as EE-van-GHEL-ee-onn? I've never heard it said out loud before, but I'd assumed ih-VAN-juh-LEE-onn. Like Evangeline but....eeon.
I worked on screen sharing in the 1990s and still do. Pushing near realtime computer screens through a modem was extremely hard work in finding clever ways to keep the byte count down before attempting bespoke compression algorithms. Some of that cleverness didn't transfer successfully to current OS designs so aren't in the product anymore.
This channel is like LGR Oddware, but even more odd. I love it. Quality content, man. Keep it up!
Right? Like LGR and Technology Connecions had a baby.
Except Clint would have tried to play Duke 3D on it somehow.
I've been a digital web archeologist since 2011. Ever since I started the Protoweb project to serve historical copies of websites for classic computer hobbyists, I've had a great time restoring web sites and discovering new aspects to them. I still having revelations, as if the past was still talking to me. I may be on my own saying this, but I think digital archeology is really interesting.
I don’t know how I stumbled upon your channel, but this is probably the 15th video I have spent my free hours watching... and, I am very thankful that passion like this exists in the world. I am continuously impressed by the knowledge, and sheer joy that you impart. Thank you!
Not boring at all. In fact, fascinating. Please keep up the great work!
thank you so much! i will!
@@CathodeRayDude I agree wholeheartedly; every piece of archaeotech should be documented and described to some extent. Just cuz the doohickey is kind of niché or meh, doesn't mean it doesn't have a place in the history of our culture of techware. Keep up the great work man!
Oh man, I totally thought you were going to replace the grayscale driver with a full color VGA driver to see if the emulation would display in color. Would be especially hilarious because I'm sure they didn't pick "gray" colors. They just picked shades of other colors that were showed up as the color they wanted. Probably.
considering you can drop the hp omnishare win 3.1 grayscale driver into generic windows 3.1 running in emulation in a dosbox and it changes to greyscale, it’s safe to say you can drop the official win 3.1 full 16 bit color driver into the dosbox running win 3.1 w/ omni share and it would work exactly as expected (ie display in color and not greyscale)
Oof, I got a wicked case of Modus Synconference once. Don't eat day old gas station sushi, no matter the markdown.
Careful there, I almost got a wicked case of hot chocolate on my Laptop :D
"EP" Is presenting to the emergency room with:
@@1FireyPhoenix oh my God it's like you can see my CZcams history, I binge watched that channel like all night until I had a panic attack about literally everything I eat and touch. now I'm pretty sure I DO have modus synconference 😱
I've been suffering from chronic WebEx myself, actually. It all started with a used office chair....
6:48 I'm going to play devils advocate here and say it all makes perfect sense. Basically they created the various stands for the tablet and the base unit, and they wanted to make sure you used them in the way they had envisioned. By doing it this way 1) it keeps things compact and uncluttered as you pointed out, and 2) you'll not easily misplace any of the parts because you have to handle them every time you change anything. In my mind it's an excellent design 👍
Love the Eva reference! Computer Chronicles is so great and valuable as a historical resource plus it's still interesting to watch. There's really no modern equivalent which is such a shame...I can only tolerate LTT so much. There's really no great all around new tech show that isn't click baity and no forced personalities.
Shame it's just a 486 and nothing anything exotic but thank for you taking the time and documenting the nitty gritty details of the device!
Yeah, I feel the same way. Thanks for watching!
Send it over.... surely not IR, surely that isn't why it had IR... well, looks like I have been surprised once again.
I'd drop 4000$ on this back in the day... did this come out when people were using cocaine at wall street parties?
Not that I experienced it but given everything I know about 1994, yeah probably.
That tablet's going to get scratched up with all the razor blades from people setting up lines on it.
They don't anymore?
@@AlRoderick at least be classy and use a credit card
@@anidnmeno you'd still get white powder stuck in the edges though. Better to just use a mirror or picture frame tbh
Just found this channel. Not only is does he talk about old tech, but from what i have seen so far hes a full blown progressive and isnt afraid to show it. I love your content. Its very obvious youre doing this because you love this stuff and want to share it. Not just for a paycheck. Youre awesome keep at it ✊
Databeam Farsite 😆😆 I sometimes miss the 90s bubble tech names.
every single one of them is solid gold. Synconference is the one that kills me.
Great video! On a side note, the CPU in this thing is not actually a true 486, but rather a Cyrix-designed and Texas Instruments-manufactured upgrade chip for 386 motherboards, the 486SLC/DLC. The SLC was a replacement for 386SX systems, where as the 486DLC for 386DX systems. Internally, they implemented and behaved a lot like a true 486, they even had a whopping 1KB of L1 cache (instead of 8KB on the original 486s), so if set up properly they provided quite a decent boost over plain 386 systems, although they were way off a true 486.
Roughly speaking, a properly configured 486DLC-40 is close to an Intel 486 DX-25.
I still would have plugged some kind of CF-IDE interface into it just to make it play Doom or Wolf3D for a laugh
When you said "how do you get documents inside it?" my first thought was to just have a regular fax machine that acts both as a printer and a scanner for the machine. In other words, I would be faxing stuff to myself in order to scan or print.
This video could be the best thing that ever came out of the HP Omnishare.
ZING
I´d try putting another HDD with dos/windows software just to see the specs of that 486 and benchmark. And, to install Win95, just for fun.
I had a VGA mono monitor that had a grey-scale palette instead CGA mono and acted like your LCD panel. I remember it was when using Windows 3, not sure if Win95 supported it, by the time I got a color VGA monitor...
i really cant believe it took me this long to find your youtube channel, been following on twitter for years. this rocks, keep up the good work
Your interest and sense of responsibility to archive and be custodian to these understated points in technical history ... is awesome. The fact that you brought stewardship up, and put some of these artifacts into the Internet Archive really speaks to me. I'll be joining your Patreon momentarily, so that you can continue the archival and documentation aspect of your work -- as well as continue your excellent storytelling
Just discovered your channel! Excellent stuff! The more people like yourself archiving with passion the better.
men I just found a video of minidisc and I can´t stop viewing your videos! I love all the research that you do for every single one... many of the tech that you show us we didn't know to exist... I remember all the 80's catalogs that my dad has in the home office of Sony, Panasonic, JVC and I love to see all the most modern things that we can´t afford it. keep the good work i already subscribe and hope for more videos of the most advanced tech of the past decades
Hey, just wanted to say, as a new viewer over come over from Twitter, that your stuff is really entertaining! I love 'old tech archive' stuff and you've managed to have me watch through a video about camcorder history, an office keyboard cleaning ASMR video, and now a video about some occult device that maybe 4 offices bought ever! Wonderful stuff. Keep on goin'!
Great job at making the "boring" fun and interesting! I realy enjoyed the windows analysis at the end!
This is excellent, I am fascinated by the retro future that this thing once represented. Also, major props for the the digital archeological preservation and sharing!!!
Amazing how you find and can describe in lenght and with passion what other people could hardly talk 2 seconds about. Like the way you tell a probable story. Thank you!
I've watched a few of you videos. Getting some serious technology connection vibes. Big fan, keep it up.
Wow. Such a nice piece of hardware. Also, excellent channel. Keep up the good work!
Interesting piece of history thanks for sharing! Love your channel!
This is the best channel on youtube. Production, script, content, 100/100. Keep it up CRD!
Hey man, I love the new setup! I like the VHS covers on the wall 10/10!
love all of your videos, thank you so much
7:26 - my Microsoft Surface pen does take batteries as well, lasts around half a year with a rechargeable NiMh AAAA (yes 4 A's) cell. The reason is so that you can point with the pen while hovering, use the side buttons, and rest the hand on the screen while hand-writing or drawing at your normal pace. The tablet digitizer can be made thinner, and doesnt have to output energy over a large surface area to hopefully power a stylus.
Also the thinkpad carbon pen needs to be "charged" and has to charging contacts that connect it while on the doc.
i mean, my wacom cintiq does that too without batteries
@@ExperimentIV Yes, but that's Wacom's patented technology and everyone else is forced to use a battery (like Microsoft/ Google/ Apple) or license from Wacom (like some ThinkPad/ Motion Computing/ Fujitsu tablets)
The S Pen from the Note 9, 10 and 20 do this, but accomplish it with a capacitor, and the pen charges while being inside the phone. Kinda interesting when you think about it.
I really like your review style. Not many youtuber explain the GUI/HW Interface and User Experience of the products. I find that as interesting as the hardware specs itself.
Wow, Vis-a-Vis, that's a name I didn't expect to hear again!
EDIT: Just wanted to go ahead and give a big open thank you for putting disk images like these on the Internet Archive, you're really keeping this stuff alive by doing that, even if it is on life support we can still dig around in it. Thanks so much!
Also the evangelion bit made me laugh at work, now my co-workers think I'm odd
80x25 was just "80 columns text" and isn't specific to PCs - You could get terminals and Apple IIs and Commodore 128s that also operated in this way. It was a fairly common setup for business machines!
ooooooo i love the new setup you got for shooting videos, 10/10
I'm in a rabbit hole. I'm only ever half listening to this guy about his whatnots and gizmos from before I was born and his voice is so nice I cant stop listening.
10/10 content.
12:57 Picture-in-Picture-in-Picture with Computer Chronicles, 10/10!!
Watching your videos makes me feel like "I am so idle and useless". You are sooo cool buddy. Keep up the good work.
i love you; thanks for all the great content :)
Thank you, for uploading the software. It's been 30 years since I poked around in Win 3 + Pen for Windows!
1- I wish I was still working at HP so I could dig up some internal info on this for you. 2- if you are looking for other things to try maybe image another drive and put it in and see if you can get the nic to work with some win31 drivers? Would be neat to see if you could run Netscape on it.
This channel is like LGR meets Technology Connections and I'm HERE for it
Really fantastic work; just the right kind of analysis that these fascinating pockets of technology history need.
Can't wait to see more in this vein.
The resources HP plowed into this thing were probably not much more than any other laptop system, and there were certainly plenty of those platforms that had short, disappointing lifecycles. But it really is strange how painful they made it to ingest documents into this thing, without any sort of removable storage media. Any indication what kind of PCMCIA cards it might be intended to support?
Fabulous video sir. Love "the chronicles" and all this junk. Right up my alley!
Let me get this straight: They didn't bother with Windows / DOS support with this even though underneath IT WAS DOS / WINDOWS?! Omg. That would have been a Huge Advantage to have it work seamlessly with 3.1 and your standard Wintel computer. It might have even been a commercial success. Cue AVGN: "What were they thinkiiiinnnggggg?!?!?"
That was super interesting, especially when you cracked it open to see what was inside. Crazy how it's basically just a PC.
I could imagine this being more useful as a drawing tablet system if it had an additional video port for a PVM or BVM to view a full-colour image of your drawing/graphic/green screen overlay
yeah, if it had... almost *anything* else, it could be a really cool device for other purposes. A video port, a keyboard port, anything.
@@fadate7292
There's also the front PCMCIA port...
I think this is an early version of those DocuPad things that dealerships have for you to e-sign documents.
Those things are a VERY expensive and very narrow in their usage too, and yet somehow, they're practically ubiquitous. So clearly this thing DOES have a market.
They combined the clip with the stand because it forced people to keep the whole assembly together, otherwise that would have ended up lost in a drawer somewhere instead of neatly stowed. Same reason as the “annoying foot” on the base unit.
I very much enjoy the stickers on the shelf and the branding on the tape case next to it :) And the video itself, but that goes without saying.
I often wish I had the time, money and energy to be you! Excellent Video!
I love your videos.
I have no clue why I found this fascinating, but bravo!
I enjoy these old products so much more than modern tech at this point. Not sure how much of that is nostalgia and how much of it is the state of tech these days. Love your work ❤
No one can accuse you of clickbait titles! Seriously though live your videos keep it up. Love the AV club vibe - makes me want to push a crt on a cart down a high school hallway.
Eagerly awaiting the Simultaneous Voice and Data video
I had no choice but to pause the video just to compliment you on some beautiful Eva jokes Sir. Top Notch work. Imagine all the tech channel bros standing around you clapping.
Burns down, falls over, sinks into the LCL...
This was actually a really cool video
Man with that name, it just begs to be nicknamed "HP Overshare".
And there are definitely still graphics tablets that have battery-powered pens. Some at least are rechargeable. Others are entirely battery free.
Maybe architecture firms bought multiple, and loaned them out to big customers?
New studio space looks nice! (Or is it just a 45 degree rotation?)
Honestly, the A/V World still pumps out oddities like this.
I'm looking at you, Crestron.
This kinda makes me think of PowWow - also thank you for making the stylus into an Eva
Had this playing as background while working and loved the random Evangellion refrence
This has to be the most obscure product. I'd bet money that this is an hp Corvallis unit, designed by the same guys that did the omnibooks and lx range. Actually, I bet this IS an omnibook inside.
I am super curious if that proprietary plug from the tablet would fit into an omnibook 800ct. I know it's proprietary scsi on the couch omnibook
It might be boring for you, but I think it's pretty exciting :)
Which to be fair, is probably more credit to YOUR editing and creative sharing of knowledge vs the stuff itself.
eva reference earned you a sub. top tier.
You're right about the scroll bars being a driver thing. Most of the bitmap-based controls in Win16 are drawn by the drivers, and there were tools to safely edit them. Title bar buttons, scroll bars, checkboxes and radio buttons, cursors, I think also the standard message box icons...
great content
"technologies from the 70s or earlier" the absolutely wild thing is that the fax machine predated the telephone. We just couldn't get them cheap enough to put in every office.
If I understand you correctly this device was from the pre-ISDN Era. A "simultaneous" voice and data modem wouldn't make much sense with ISDN, as you have 64000 bits per second per channel and you have 2 channels available. So you could just use G.726 in its 48k mode and use the remaining 16k for data.
Congratulations!
Regarding the bit at the end about preservation... You _have_ preserved it! You imaged it, and it could always be restored. Playing around with a windowsified version, I don't think would betray its legacy, as you could always just pop the original drive back in.
The pen looks much like the one used on GRiD tablet PCs. The battery compartment looks the same actually.
Research one of my friends is doing is suggesting that this is based on a Gazelle digitizer which is shared with an incomplete Logitech product called a Penman and - the GRiD Convertible. So I strongly suspect a GRiD load of Windows for Pen Computing would work.
It's the weird, boring, useless, pointless devices that makes the useful and interesting ones cool! We've got to see them all.
It might just be me, and I was thinking about this as I watched the video; IMHO it's fine without music added.
I was not expecting those Eva references but I certainly enjoyed them!
That stand/case thing is too precious for this world.
So, for just $2500, you can scribble on virtual documents and fax them somewhat faster than just writing on hard copies and faxing them normally.
I imagine you could fax large - format documents, which might have been a major selling point for an architectural firm.
@@moconnell663 but... You got to have exactly this type of machine on the other end (and we don't know limitations of its standard and if it could be even pulled off, or it limited to letter for compability reasons). So inside firm it makes more sense to send archived cad files, and client with this thing could be pretty rare case
Now I want to grab that disc image and, after running it up in a VM, use it with my Wacom stylus just for total meta-redundancy!
"In Case of Emergency, Break Glass and Install Omnishare."
Very nice look into some obsucre tech!
The rubber foot on there seems to be a weird insurance for cooling I think. Since there is a vent grill at the bottom, it would have been blocked if the dock is not used and the appliance is put on a flat surface. That and annoying the user to use the dock....
In regards to the 'chicken and egg' problem, I could reasonably see a single company using several of them. The construciton project is in Texas but the engineers are in New York, the company has a handful of Omnishares and sends one out to Texas so they can go over the plans / changes with the engineers in realtime
oh lord that MSN clock triggered me, lol, I used to do retail marketing materials for microsoft software launches, and Franklin Gothic font family was everything back then, shivers!
"Evangelion style" -- ok, funny -- "Power the stylus Shinji, or the bench will have to do it again" -- not out of nowhere but I have coffee in my nose now. Good form.
Evangelion style! That won me over, you earned your like sir.
smart technologies smart thingy sounds like the company who did smart boards
2:30 Haha, to be honest you're kind of a colossus yourself, I didn't expect your hand to be so big in comparison to the box :-)