a couple weeks ago i was looking up
information on mid 90s collaboration
software um collaboration being stuff
like webex where you can
connect to somebody else's computer and
see what they're doing as they're doing
it so you can
work on a problem together you can
collaborate over the internet now you
might guess that this is a new industry
but unsurprisingly since i'm saying this
sentence it definitely isn't it's been
around for decades
in fact there was an explosion of
collaboration software
in the mid 90s um circa 1994 in fact
there were
a whole bunch of programs trying to beat
webex to market you know 15 years ahead
of schedule
i have a whole list of their dead
trademarks here let me read these to you
intel pro share ibm person to person
smart technology smart 2000
future labs talk show data beam farsight
modis sing conference rtz virtual
meeting
fujitsu dtc world links vis-a-vis and
cross-wise
face-to-face i just about ran out of
breath reading those there was this
cambrian explosion of collaboration apps
that provided
various capabilities up to and including
full screen
sharing just like we have now uh if you
ask me how they pulled that off over
14.4k modems
i couldn't tell you at any rate i was
looking everywhere to try and find
information about these things and maybe
even find the software itself
so i was looking on google books on
internet archive i was even looking on
ebay to see if i could buy
original boxed copies but every one of
these programs is just lost
to time i mean they're gone man at the
nadir of this process i was on internet
archive and i searched for one of these
programs and all i got were like
two pdfs about unrelated businesses an
episode of the computer chronicles and
then the same episode in french
i was so bummed at this point that i
just gave up and i just clicked on the
computer chronicles video and started
watching it and to my surprise it was
actually about this topic and had a
whole bunch of the programs that i was
looking for
in it now of course the computer
chronicles video was a preview from
back when these programs were brand new
so it's not a comprehensive
documentation
of what they were like so i still want
to find all this software
but it was interesting viewing you know
i got to see what a number of these did
and how they were received by the early
public
but then in the middle of it there was
something that grabbed my attention all
of a sudden there's this guy on the
screen that's got this tablet that he's
poking at and it's got a ui on it i
don't recognize and i'm like i gotta
know what this is
so i go straight to google and start
searching for it i find
no information about the device which
was called the hp
omnishare so i go over to ebay on a whim
and i find one for 99.
here's that this box is a much larger
than i had anticipated when i ordered it
the device itself is actually not nearly
as big but let's go ahead and get this
unpacked
i've actually been into this before but
i wanted to show you what the original
shipping configuration looked like
because
this thing's in kind of a nice box all
things considered for instance as soon
as you open the box it's got this rubric
showing you how to unpack the thing
which is sort of a
kind of an interesting touch for this
era for 1994
which is when this thing came out seems
kind of ahead of its time
so the first thing in here is this big
cardboard tray
that contains all the accessories we'll
get into those later then we've got
the appliance itself and
the tablet so this little gray tower is
the appliance itself and the first thing
you notice upon getting out of the box
is that it doesn't
sit flat on the bottom and it turns out
that's because
there's this little rubber foot down
here and i thought that maybe the
previous owner just stuck that on there
on a whim
but there's actually a little alignment
mark here so i think that was supposed
to be on there from the factory
i'll show you why i think that is in a
little bit you'll notice the front of
the machine is pretty basic you've got
power and status lights you have a
mysterious button here with a sort of
meaningless symbol
and then you've got a door here that
reveals a pair of pcm caa slots
there's also an infrared receiver and a
badge here for att
audio span which will figure into the
story much later the back of the machine
also has a very appliance-like look to
it we've got an ethernet port a serial
port parallel port
this funky port here for the tablet
itself and then modem jacks
what you'll notice it doesn't have is
any standard pc ports on it it doesn't
have a keyboard mouse port normal vga
anything that would suggest this is
based on pc hardware and that is a lot
of why i wanted to get this thing when i
saw in the computer chronicles video i
saw the gui
was completely unique and i thought well
what if this is some bespoke
motorola 68k machine with like a
completely homegrown operating system
and software on it you know
this could be the last thing of its type
in the world i better grab this
quick and find out if it's something
really special well we'll investigate
that question later but first
let's look at the rest of the machine
next we've got the tablet
it has a pen groove up here it's got
controls for brightness and contrast you
have to operate with the stylus
and then on the back you've got these
two
flip out legs which allow it to sit
at a nice comfortable angle the cord
here has a mini centronics plug on it
definitely a proprietary connection but
who's surprised all right now let's look
at the accessory kit
so first off we've got the manuals both
the installation guide which is like the
full user manual warranty and then the
quick guide which is just how to turn it
on and get it started
then we've got a driver disk and we'll
talk more about what's on there later
because it's interesting that you need
drivers at all for this thing we've
obviously got
iec cable for power there is a serial
cable
for connection to a modem uh then you've
got just uh your basic telephone cord
they've got a box containing the stylus
which we'll see in greater detail
later finally we've got the stands let
me put everything else away and show you
how those work
so there's two parts to the stand uh
first we've got the main base itself
which we can set the main system unit in
like yay
and then the tablet is meant to go in
the other side here
but if you just set it in the slot here
it just kind of falls out
instead you're supposed to take this
clip here and put it
in that slot after which we can then
put the tablet in like yay and then
you've got this nice compact
storage location for this thing so it's
not taking up a whole bunch of space
with the tablet
out on your desk now this is uh i
suspect
the reason that the main system unit has
that rubber foot on the bottom is i
think hp was trying to irritate you into
using the stand correctly
because if you were to put the tablet in
here with the clip
by itself i suspect it would more easily
tip over
but you're going to get that foot and be
like i can't get it off i guess i'll
just
put it in the stand and weight it down
so that it doesn't flip over
i'm just guessing but i can't think why
else they would have done that that clip
is actually a more interesting thing
because
what it actually is if you pull it out
of here is it's a stand
that allows you to use the tablet in an
upright position so you can put it down
like that and these little feet hold the
thing up
so you can use it vertically instead of
laying down on the surface
so this is a neat feature but it's weird
that they combined it with the base that
you have to use that
to make the base work strange design
decision
so there's not that much to look at on
the outside of the device um we could
read the manual but what fun is that
it's actually quite a lot of fun i love
reading old manuals you find all sorts
of stuff in there
that you wouldn't have known from any
other source but this is a video we
probably want to see the thing work so
let's go ahead and power it up but
before we fire this up we need to get
the pen ready and let me explain what i
mean by that
modern tablets use pens that are either
capacitive or i think sometimes
inductive and if you go back far enough
you find tablets that used resistive
screens
which meant you could use any piece of
plastic or other blunt object or even a
fingertip in a pinch
this pen however is of the worst
possible horror show variety
it takes batteries i don't exactly know
why pens back then took batteries but it
is a huge pain in the ass
so if you look uh in the box here
there's these two
awful miserable little cells up here uh
they are energizer 393's
a format that nobody is going to just
have on hand at home
not even me so i had to send away for a
couple of these and
i'm sad to report that they did arrive
just before i started shooting the video
so i can just put them in here
which is a bummer because it means i
won't get to do this caveman style see
before i spent money on batteries for
this i wanted to make sure it actually
worked
so i took the cap off and looked at the
contacts and they're big enough i
thought i could probably get some
alligator clips on there so i got my
bench power supply and ran it up to 2.9
volts clipped it on there
and sure enough it worked i was able to
run the pen evangelion style
unfortunately though i might mess up the
contacts doing that so i can't justify
it a second time
power the stylus shinji or the bench
supply will have to do it again
right so now we are ready to start it up
the button on the front is not a soft
power switch which is not surprising
given its age
instead you just hit the 110 volts so as
we boot up here we get the hewlett
packard logo
and then we're going to get the
omnishare logo
and now we're ready to omnishare this is
fairly readable to humanize but it's
kind of tough to get a good shot of it
on camera
don't worry though later in the video
you'll get a much clearer picture so now
we're booted and we're at the
desktop as it were there's not a whole
lot of things going on here
so we've got an in tray and then we have
a number of documents
and then we've got these icons down the
sidebar here so for instance i can
grab a document and i can drag it around
here if i tap on the name it'll allow me
to
rename it it pulls up this on-screen
keyboard because this thing has
no keyboard input as i said you can drag
things into the trash for instance
you can drag them to one of the sidebar
icons and those sidebar icons are
the viewer annotator they're the fax
machine
the printer and the copier and at this
point it would probably be a good idea
to explain
what this device is actually meant to be
the hp omnishare is an
interactive fax machine i don't know if
that's what hp called it but
functionally that's what it is and i did
find
one book which described it as part of a
genre of interactive facts technologies
that were coming up in the world at the
time
although i couldn't figure out what the
other ones were because google books
only shows me some of the pages in the
book
once you see what this thing does though
interactive facts is a perfect
name for it the items on the desktop
here represent documents and then within
each document there are pages
so we have the readme document and the
registration document and then an
unnamed one over here
if i double tap the first page of
registration which is very hard on this
thing it usually takes me about five
tries
you can see that this is a scan of what
appears to be a paper form
so this is an eight and a half by eleven
page and i can grab the scroll bar here
to uh slide up and down now when i first
got in here i tried just tapping on the
page and dragging
and what i didn't said is i scribbled on
it because i'm used to modern touch
interfaces where you know you just
touch and drag a thing that i don't
think anybody had invented until like
the 2000s
when we scroll down to the end of this
page here it advises us to hit this icon
to turn to the next page
there's page forward and back here
there's only a couple actions we can do
on a document we can
zoom in for instance which as you can
see takes quite a while for it to render
we can also rotate the document 90
degrees in any direction
and the final tools are the pen and the
eraser and those allow us to
scribble on the document or erase just
our scribbling so there's a few things
you can do with those
for instance the included registration
document actually expects you
to use the pen tool here on the device
to fill out the registration
so despite the fact that we're on a
computer
and we could actually type this in
with a keyboard if we had one installed
we're instead just
going to write it on the screen like a
barbarian
now the reason for that is that the
instructions here actually say you're
supposed to flip through this paper
document
on this computer fill it out with the
pen and then
you drag it to the fax machine to fax it
directly to hp to register your device
so that's one thing that omnishare is
capable of you can digitally annotate a
document and fax it to someone
but that's a pretty extreme use case for
a dedicated device like this so it'd be
pretty silly to use it for just that
and sure enough that's not really what
it's for it's just a bonus feature
the really interesting stuff happens
when you have a second omni share
see the idea is you're supposed to dial
up somebody else who also has an
omnishare and then once you're connected
you take one of your documents and you
transmit it to them then once it arrives
they have a duplicate of that document
which is referenced back to yours
now when you're dialed up from your
machine to theirs if you pull up the
document in the annotator and start
scribbling on it your scribbles appear
at their
end in real time the idea with this is
that you would be an architectural firm
and you would send uh some blueprints
over to a client
and the client would get on their
omnishare and you get on your omnishare
and then the client would be able to go
okay i just want to widen this up here
instead of having to go uh well the room
that's at the top that's the left of the
big room i want to make the walls
a little bit wider there you know but
not not wider like you know like from my
perspective wider so just
just make it wider in a few different
ways and just send me like five faxes
with different kinds of wide rooms
that sucks but it's what people were
doing back then so it'd be a lot easier
for the client to be able to just go i
want it
like that now i can show you a demo of
that which is clipped from the computer
chronicles episode that i found i'll put
it up here
in the corner for a few seconds and i'll
link it in the description so you can go
watch the whole thing
but i'm not going to be able to show it
to you live because
i only have one of these they're meant
to talk to each other and hp
never made a software version of this
could run on a pc even though i'm sure
they could have
so i've got no way to show you what it
does the thing is um
you've already seen what it does i mean
it does faxing and annotation
if i plugged it into another one you
would just see it doing faxing and
annotation over there
i could show you that when i scribble on
this one the scribbles appear over on
that one
but i don't think we're really missing
much by not being able to see that i
guess
hp didn't think it needed to do more
because they figured this was going to
be
a killer feature uh which is kind of
wild i think they probably sold like 30
of these because this is not
a killer feature i mean even at the time
i don't think this was a killer feature
i mean
people could buy pc software that did
pretty much the same stuff as this
that's why i was looking it
up because i knew it was possible also
uh that software didn't cost
twenty five hundred dollars which is
what this setup cost
at that price i mean who was going to
invest in this there'd be no point in
buying one
unless you knew you were going to be
working with a lot of people who had
them themselves and they weren't going
to buy one
unless they knew they were going to be
working with a lot of companies that had
them so it was a chicken and egg problem
you could say that about fax machines or
pc modems but i mean
those were huge technological advances
everyone who saw them knew these were
going to go places especially because
they were so much
older than this i mean those are
technologies from the 70s or earlier
i think the sole advantage that this
thing might have promised was the audio
span feature which i will explain
more on in a couple minutes but i don't
even think that was compelling enough to
make
this thing sell because you could get
that on a pc as well in other words the
reason i can't find a review of this in
any magazine and i can't find any info
on any website about it is because it's
dumb and pointless and sucked so no one
bought one
i don't like it either so that would be
the end of the video and it would be a
pretty boring video if i ended it there
but there are a number of interesting
loose ends to tie up first question how
do you get documents into it i showed
you all the tools this thing has there
are no authoring tools on the thing you
can make a new page and scribble on it
but that's it so
how do you get the files in here to send
to someone the answer to that is that
you make them on your pc
this thing has several i o ports and i
guess conceivably hp
could have made it compatible with a
scanner so you could ingest documents
but i don't think there were very many
parallel port scanners in 1994
and this thing doesn't have scuzzy so hp
would have been
hard pressed to convince somebody to go
buy a 1500
scanner to pair with their 2500 dollar
boat anchor that they'd already
purchased so
that was a non-starter instead the
driver disc contains
an emulated printer which you install in
windows
and then from whatever application
you're using word processor
whatever you print a file to the printer
which spits it out into an omni shared
proprietary file on the hard drive
you can then send it to the omnishare
now there's a lan port on the back here
so you would imagine you could send the
files over the network
no you can't there's also pcmcia slots
up here so you'd think you could put
them on a flash cart
no you can't in fact the only way to
move data on and off of this thing
is over serial or infrared irda which is
also basically serial
you'd think the ethernet port in the
pcmcia slots would be active
but hp makes no mention of them in the
documentation i suspect they're things
that they added
and wanted to get working but then they
ran out of development budget frankly i
have a strong hunch that this was not
the device's full potential the hp
had other plans for it that they ran out
of money to implement
and just put out something that did the
bare minimum which proceeded to flop so
corporate went well i guess nobody wants
that and then didn't finish it
second question how does this
collaboration strategy work if you have
to use the modem to connect to the other
machine
how are you going to talk to the other
person if you're on the phone with the
modem
i mean sure you could buy two phone
lines but you couldn't sell this product
on the assumption that everyone was
going to do that that wasn't going to
fly
the answer comes from that att voice
span badge on the front
this is a technology that's largely
forgotten called simultaneous voice and
data
which does exactly what it says on the
tin there were a number of technologies
for this back in the mid 90s which
allowed you to dial up from one modem to
another
and send data while talking on the phone
at the same time this was no joke
it did actually work and there were a
number of technologies that did it i've
got a big video planned
where i'm going to explain how all these
worked and demo all of them
but for the moment what you need to know
is that it did work this really would
have been super slick
you would have called up from this
device to the other you would have been
scribbling on the screen
the other person be able to see it and
talk to you at the same time over one
phone line it's really cool
so again maybe hp thought the voice span
feature is what was going to make this
sell
but you could get a modem for a pc that
did the same thing so
i still don't see what justifies the
price tag and this being a discreet
device
by the way the button on the front
that's for the voice band feature when
you hit the button it just drops your
call instantly
third question what does the copier icon
do answer
it copies a document that is to say you
drop a document on it and now you have a
second copy
of it why you couldn't just tap on the
header and click copy or duplicate i
don't know
so finally what is it i mean on a
hardware software level
is this a bespoke motorola 68k based
integrated system or not
uh no i do have some footage from when i
first plugged this thing in and as you
can see i got an
error message when i first started it up
in 80 by 25 text mode
that is a video mode unique to pcs so
this is definitely based on pc hardware
of course uh it's still really small so
it can't be an off-the-shelf pc
motherboard
and we still have to wonder what the
software is well answers to those things
were forthcoming as soon as i started
working on this thing because
when i looked in the holes on the back i
saw a hard drive and i knew immediately
i was going to have to take it apart
you can't buy a 26 year old information
appliance with a hard drive in it and
just
turn it on i mean obviously god is going
to strike your hard drive dead for your
hubris
so you have to open it up get the hard
drive out and image it that's just good
stewardship so the first thing i did is
i
took the case off gutted it took the
hard drive out imaged it and i
immediately answered a lot of my
questions
first question what is it it's a 486
it's got a tiny texas instruments 486
chip on the board
otherwise it's completely custom bespoke
pc motherboard
which i guess made sense because hp was
rolling in money at the time and so they
could waste money making a completely
unique pc
with like a dual stacked motherboard
just to make it a little bit smaller
i don't have a deep analysis of what's
on the board because it's just jelly
bean pc hardware i mean
modem nick whatever yawn the hard drive
is a completely ordinary for the time
ide hundred megabyte quantum so i just
plugged into a usb adapter and ripped an
image
by the way you can find a link in the
description to that image on internet
archive along with the driver disk
so with access to the contents of the
disk i can now find out how the thing
worked
and unsurprisingly it's not very
exciting it runs windows they did a
really good job of hiding the trappings
of the os
but microsoft probably provided a
version of windows that was for this
purpose
so i started digging into it to find out
what they'd changed and i was surprised
to find out
not much really looking at the any files
and the included drivers and whatnot
it looked like fairly stock windows with
some pretty minimal modifications i
started thinking i could probably run
this in an emulator
well here's that it launched in dosbox
with almost no modifications
i did have to remove smartdrive from the
autoexec.bat in order to prevent it from
hanging
but otherwise it just booted straight up
into windows started the omnishare
software and
that was that at first my mouse didn't
work but that turned out to be because
the pen
operates with a special hp mouse driver
that converts the pen inputs into mouse
positions so i just brought over the
original mouse driver from a normal copy
of windows 3 and
my mouse worked as a pen input so at
this point the entire os and software
stack were all functional i could open
up a document i could scribble on it
with the mouse
i could even conceivably have faxed it
to someone if i could get the modem to
work
and that was where things fell apart i
was hoping i could get
an actual functioning omnishare in
emulation or even on a real laptop that
i could plug into this thing
so i could actually demo the software
functionality fully
but i just couldn't get over this modem
hurdle no matter what i did it always
just came up and said that the phone
line wasn't connected which is just a
generic error it gives any time it can't
reach the modem it seems
i tried a number of real modems
including a couple that i knew supported
the voice span feature
but nothing worked i'm guessing it's
looking for a very specific
answer to like the modem version and
stuff like that i messed around with
some files and i tried dumping the
serial stream to see if i could make
sense of what it was expecting but
nothing worked so i just gave up i mean
it's not really worth it to beat my head
against it like i said if i got it
working i'd just be able to scribble
here and see the scribbles appear there
it's not too exciting
two useless devices instead of one yeah
we did it the one remaining
customization i found intriguing was
that hp had included their own
monochrome vga driver
now the original windows 3 had a black
and white video mode but that was one
bit
cga color whereas this is 16 color
vga it just maps all the colors to
grayscales this is presumably to make
windows look better on the monochrome
lcd panel but what's interesting is you
can take this driver
drop it into a normal copy of windows 3
and it will just
work it'll just convert all your colors
to shades of gray there are two
interesting effects from this
the first is that the scroll bars in
normal windows programs now look like
the omnishare scroll bars
now i'm told the reason for this is that
win16 video drivers had to implement
pretty much the entire windows graphics
stack
which meant that they knew when they
were drawing a scroll bar and could
override the scroll bar graphics with
their own custom ones
the other thing is if you open up the
windows color picker it does fascinating
things to the gradient i think
they're beautiful i would think that any
other program in windows 3 that used a
lot of colors would look pretty cool in
this mode
but i couldn't really think of any
offhand so i didn't know what else to do
with it
so there's only one other interesting
thing i think i could do with this thing
which would be to take the pen driver
load it into a normal copy of windows 3
and then put that back on this machine
producing a windows 3 machine with pen
input
that's a cute idea but in doing so i
would be modifying and thus destroying a
historical artifact and as much as i
don't want this thing and i'm going to
get rid of it as quickly as possible
to a good home i wouldn't want to change
it like that when i could just go and
get a 486 tablet pc i mean they did make
them
this device is a great example of what
technology preservation is often like
dead boring i don't like this thing now
that i have it i don't
really find anything about it very
interesting but maybe it's the last one
of its type in the world and me buying
it off ebay kept it from being forgotten
forever it is not as it turns out very
cool and the way it's built is not
really all that cool but even so we
should remember that this is a path that
some major corporations thought we were
going to go down
at some point and that tells us a lot
about what the environment was like in
1994 that something like this
was even seen as viable to the point
where they put this much r
d into it and that software is now
online and will probably be online for
many many years and anyone can go
and look at it and find a lot of
information about how this thing
was designed and who made it and why
they made it if they care to look
there's a whole bunch of comments about
all the files on the drive that they
edited
explaining things about the development
history and i'm sure you could pull all
sorts of interesting facts out of there
if you go and spend
the time for instance in just my
rudimentary review of this thing's files
i found that a lot of them referred to
it as pike which i suspect was hp's
internal code name for it
i figure anything that had a code name
during development deserves scrutiny by
future historians
archaeology is uh probably always boring
but i think it's worth it
so i hope you had a good time watching
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tears since my last video
and that is jeff schumacher lem jay
hey jay and richard stevens and of
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