Xywrite in your palm

[Daniel Say say@xxxxxxxx]

..... from the other side of the mountain, in Notabene land
comes this account of carrying Xywrite (same, almost, as
Notabene mentioned) on a Palmtop in your pocket.

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 From: Feinmanr@xxxxxxxx
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 Subject: Nota Bene in the Palm of My Hand

WARNING: This posting contains material that may be unsuitably arousing for
NotaBeneiers. Parental discretion (or spousal restraint) is advised.

We can only hope that, someday, we will be able to carry Nota Bene for
Windows on those jazzy new handheld organizers with the color screens and
their nifty icons. Until then, I carry NB4.5a for DOS on my Hewlett Packard
200LX palmtop computer. It works, and surprisingly well, but with some
important limitations.

In simplest terms, running NB on the palmtop would most closely resemble
running it on an IBM/XT with 640Kb RAM, no added memory, and no diskette
immediately handy for loading files (you carry those files on the RAM drive).
 Because of NB's memory-handling features, editing operations will be fast.
Disk-intensive operations, such as program start-up, swapping data files, and
spell-checking, will be noticeably sluggish. Printing is possible, but
especially slow. It would be reasonable to think of this as a means of
carrying with you a chapter of your thesis, dissertation, or book to edit "on
the fly", or to dash off a few memos during your daily commute. You can sit
under a tree on campus all afternoon and review an article without worrying
about the batteries wearing down. Legal briefs up to about 50 pages
double-spaced are definitely "do-able" Relying upon this setup to tackle
larger files or writing projects is not recommended.

WHAT IS THE HP200LX?

The 200LX is a miniaturized implementation of the IBM XT/AT architecture
encased in a hard, green/gray colored, plastic clamshell design that is small
enough to fit in a gentleman's coat pocket or a lady's purse. Its outer
appearance resembles the familiar Sharp or Casio electronic organizers,
except that it is a bit thicker.

The CPU is an Intel Hornet chip, which is 80186-compatible and runs at
7.91MHz. The operating system is MS-DOS 5.0. The LX comes with 4Mb of
memory, 640K of which may be used as system RAM for running applications.
There is no expanded or extended memory. EMS can be emulated through the use
of a special freeware driver, however its practicality is limited.

The 200LX has a 640x200 mono CGA screen, which emulates 4-color mode by
mapping them to gray scales. The display has both standard 80-column by
25-row and 64 X 18 modes. There is no backlighting, however, contrast and
brightness can be adjusted to suit ambient lighting conditions. The screen
is very readable in the manner of early LCD screen laptops of 1986-88
vintage, but should not be compared to modern, higher resolution, backlit
devices.

Because of the low power requirements of the chip and screen, the LX can run
on just two AA batteries (regular, alkaline or NiCad) for an extended period
of time. Users report durations of anywhere from two weeks to one month on a
set of AAs, depending upon usage. There is one Lithium backup battery #2032,
which is commonly available at drug and electronics stores, and should be
changed annually. The power system supports a "resume" feature, which means
that it is not necessary to close an application that is running when you
wish to take a break; you simply turn the palmtop off and then pick up where
you left off by turning it on again.

The keyboard is a chiclet--style QWERTY arrangment that represents perhaps
the greatest compromise to achieve the palmtop's remarkably compact size. It
emulates the IBM 101 extended keyboard but uses different "scan codes." All
the function keys are there, even a separate numeric pad. However,
touch-typing is not a realistic expectation. The shift keys are "sticky" by
design as an aid to typing. Press them, and the shift state remains in
effect until the next key is depressed.

The LX also features a true RS-232 serial port, and one PCMCIA 2.0 card slot
for optional flash memory, modem, parallel port interface, or LAN adapter
cards. The constraint upon these, or any other card used with the machine,
is that they must be rated at 150ma or less to prevent excessive power
demand, even when the LX is connected to an AC adapter. The serial port was
included for desktop connectivity, but it will also accommodate an external
modem or any other RS-232 compliant device. The LX is currently sold with a
special serial cable included. There is no disk drive, but users have
reported great success in connecting the LX to such parallel port devices as
the 100Mb Iomega Zip Drive and CD-ROM readers for file transfer purposes.
Users continually investigate the compatibility of new storage options as
they enter the marketplace.

There is a full suite of a dozen PIM applications built into the system's
ROM, which means that storing them takes up no user memory. These
HP-supplied applications are vaguely descended from, but far better than,
Lotus Metro. They share a Windows-like graphical user interface called
"System Manager," and feature pull-down menus and dialog boxes. However, the
unit does not do Microsoft Windows. A full implementation of Lotus 1-2-3
v2.4, Pocket Quicken, cc:Mail Mobile, and Laplink Remote are added to the ROM
suite. Except for a minor and user-remediable glitch in the way Lotus 1-2-3
handles date functions, the entire unit is Y2K compliant.

Note: The palmtop is still available at retail from HP dealers, however, HP
is rumored to be planning the discontinuation of this model by the end of
this year.

INSTALLATION OF NOTA BENE 4.5 DOS

The most practical application for Nota Bene on the palmtop is the basic word
processing program, without the Scholar's Workstation add-ons, i.e., Ibid,
Ibidem, and Orbis. For bibliographical work on the palmtop, see Inmagic's
now-freeware program, InMagic Plus for DOS, which may be downloaded from
their website. It can easily export records in a format that will be
understood by Ibidem.

The basic installation will occupy less than 2Mb of the palmtop's RAM drive,
leaving well over 1 Mb free for data and overlay swapping. "Basic" Nota Bene
should first be installed on the C:> drive of a desktop or laptop computer,
then transferred to its own directory on the C:> drive of the palmtop.
Before running NB, the palmtop's System Manager shell should be terminated
and any unnecessary drivers or TSR's unloaded from memory to leave as much
free RAM as possible. Precious memory can also be conserved by using the
palmtop's built-in editor to revise HP's autoexec.bat and config.sys files
and depositing the results on your C:> drive. In particular, remove the
extraneous card-handling and Laplink commands from the autoexec.bat. In
config.sys, reduce the "lastdrive" statement from "J" to "E" (each
unnecessary additional drive allocation consumes an additional buffer in
memory). Now reboot the palmtop using the familiary Ctrl-Alt-Del key
combination. Terminate System Manager after startup.

Load NB (preferably with the "K" switch to save even more memory). Use the
palmtop's On-/ key combination to invert the screen "colors" so that the
background is white and the foreground shows the user interface in black.
Setting window and text "colors" is the most difficult challenge, but once
done never has to be repeated. I display underlining as slightly gray-shaded
text. I use inversion or flashing mode to display other character
attributes. It takes some experimentation with the palmtop's keyboard
controls to get satisfactory results, but I am quite pleased. By adjusting
the screen contrast with the ON -(minus) or ON +(plus) key combinations, you
can clearly see all menu selections. Additional control over the screen is
provided by the ON-* combination, which cycles through four gray scales.

 >From the "Set" menu, you should also change the memory option for
spell-checking to "512". With this setting, NB will not reserve a portion of
memory for swapping the speller, but will load it entirely from "disk,"
thereby leaving you with some additional RAM for your document(s).

Optimally, after the editor loads on startup, you will have approximately
212Kb free RAM as a fast workspace..

OPERATIONAL ISSUES

If you' use keystroke commands instead of the menus in NB4.5a, some of the
three-keystroke combinations are very difficult to perform on the palmtop's
keyboard, but there are usually substitutes and workarounds for these. Many
are to be found in NB's special combinations for laptop keyboards. "Normal"
editing operations have not posed any problem for me.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

People who have used the HP palmtop for more than simple to-do lists and
contact management have generally learned that its versatility is almost
endless (some of them are surfing the Web with their DOS palmtops even as you
read this), so long as they accept its compromise nature and hardware
constraints. Running NB on the palmtop should also be approached with this
same spirit of adventurousness tempered by lower expectations. If you are
willing to accept the limitations of this setup, however, you will find that,
in spite of them, NB on the palmtop not only serves as a useful adjunct to
your work on the desktop or notebook, but also puts Pocket Word on the WinCE
handhelds to shame and disgrace.

-roger-