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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 circa 1994 in fact there were a whole bunch of programs trying to beat webex to market you know 15 years ahead of schedule uh 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 syn conference rtz virtual meeting fujitsu dtc world links vis-a-vis and crosswise 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 asked 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 at google books on internet archive i was even looking on ebay to see if i could buy original box 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 then you've got just your basic telephone cord then we'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 table 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 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 that 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're 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 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 a 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 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'll 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 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 2500 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'll 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 can 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 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 omnishare 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 at t voice band 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 will 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 100 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 gray scales 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 that 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 throughout 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 probably always boring but i think it's worth it so i hope you had a good time watching this if so if you could subscribe that'll let me know you want to see more stuff like this also if you want to help me get more stuff like this to show you consider subscribing to my patreon everybody on there is sending me money that i'm using to buy things like this um a lot of them haven't shown up in videos yet because it takes a while for me to get all the stuff together to make a video about something but trust me there's a bunch of stuff in this room that's going to be in future videos that you helped purchase thank you so much for your support i'd also like to specifically thank all the people who have joined my higher patreon tears since my last video and that is jeff schumacher lem j hey jay and richard stevens and of course i want to thank everybody else who was enjoying my stuff i couldn't do it without you thank you for watching you're in the way