HP OmniBook

OmniBook is a line of laptops originally made by Hewlett-Packard and currently sold by HP Inc., the 2015 successor to the original Hewlett-Packard. It was first introduced in 1993 as a line of business-oriented laptops and subnotebooks and was originally discontinued in 2002 following the acquisition of Compaq by Hewlett-Packard, with the Compaq Presario, HP Compaq, and HP Pavilion laptops succeeding the OmniBook line.

Nearly 22 years later in May 2024, HP Inc. announced the revival of the OmniBook brand as part of a rebranding of its PC product lines. The new "Omni" brand would be used for all consumer PCs (aside from Omen), with OmniBook for laptops, OmniDesk for desktop computers, and OmniStudio for all-in-one PCs. This new branding would replace the long-running Pavilion brand in use since 1995, among other brands.

OmniBook 300
The HP OmniBook 300 (OB300) is a subnotebook released as one of the first models in the OmniBook line in 1993. It weighed only 2.9 pounds and measured 1.4 × 6.4 × 11.1 inches. It is powered by an AMD 386SX-LV processor, featured a full-size keyboard, a pop-up computer mouse (This same pop-up mouse would later be used in the OmniBook 800CT; see the image above), and a 9-inch VGA screen. It had two PCMCIA slots for additional memory, modem, network cards or other peripherals. It was sold in three storage configurations: no mass storage (F1030A at US$1515), 10 MB flash memory disk (F1031A at US$2375), or 40 MB hard drive (F1032A at US$1950). Compared to the hard drive, the flash memory disk reduced the weight and storage capacity of the notebook with increased battery life. One of its outstanding features was a technology known as "Instant On".

The OmniBook 300 came with slimmed-down copies of MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1. Due to storage limitations, the OmniBook 300 included both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word pre-installed in ROM, a practice that was and still remains unusual to this day. The "International English" version of the OmniBook 300 used code page 850 (rather than the more common code page 437) as hardware code page.