I took a look at an HP Omnibook 800CT that turned out to be fully working, so this one was more about seeing what the machine was like and figuring out a practical way to get software onto it. The standout feature was the built-in pop-out mouse on the right side of the palm rest, which slid out and tucked back into the case when it wasn’t in use. That alone made the machine worth a closer look.
I went over where the 800CT fit in the Omnibook line and how quickly these machines advanced in the mid 1990s. HP moved from the 386-based Omnibook 300 in 1993 to the 486-based 600 in 1994, then to the Pentium-based 800 in 1996. This 800CT had a 166 MHz Pentium MMX and a compact form factor that was noticeably smaller than a more typical mid-90s laptop like a Toshiba Satellite. It didn’t include an internal CD-ROM drive, but HP offered an external one, and I went ahead and picked one up to complete the setup.
On the outside, the laptop had a few scuffs but cleaned up well. It had two PCMCIA slots, audio jacks, VGA, serial, parallel, infrared, and an external connector for drives and accessories. There was also a small pull-out card holder on the bottom and a memory expansion door. Inside, the machine was in good shape, with the Windows 95 and Intel Pentium MMX stickers still intact, and the keyboard was compact but still comfortable to type on.
Once I powered it up, Windows 95 loaded without any trouble. The machine showed a battery and AC status overlay during boot, and the built-in mouse worked by pressing the mouse-marked button and sliding the tiny two-button mouse out of the chassis. It was a neat design, and the tracking hardware lived in the laptop rather than in the mouse itself. I checked through the installed software and found a very business-oriented setup with Office apps and what looked like HP internal tools and shortcuts, including COE and Net Access items.
To get files onto the laptop, I looked at a few options. The machine had a Xircom 10Base-T PCMCIA network card, so networking was the easiest route with the existing setup. I also showed that the BIOS allowed booting from floppy and had PC Card mode options, which gave a few paths for a machine that didn’t already have a working operating system. Since this one already had Windows 95 installed, I stayed with file transfer over the network.
I tried using a NAS first and didn’t get that working, so I switched to a simple Windows file share. On the Windows 95 side, I shared the C: drive and confirmed the laptop had TCP/IP working on the network. On a Windows 10 system, I had to re-enable SMB 1.0/CIFS client support through the Windows Features menu before the old Windows 95 share became accessible. After that, I connected to the laptop by IP address and copied the Doom files straight to the root of the drive.
With the files transferred, I restarted into MS-DOS mode and ran Doom setup. I selected Sound Blaster settings, then found that the mouse wasn’t detected until I loaded the DOS mouse driver from the laptop’s existing mouse folder. Once that was loaded, Doom recognized keyboard and mouse control properly, and the game launched with sound.
Doom ran fine on the Omnibook 800CT, and the built-in mouse worked. The laptop handled it without any real trouble.
— Aaron
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Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
01:20 – This Omnibook Series
06:36 – External Features
09:53 – Inspecting Windows 95
18:48 – How To Transfer Files
24:58 – Adding SMB1.0 Back To Windows 10
28:44 – Testing DOOM
33:17 – Wrap Up