I'm going to hook this up to an HP omnibook 425.

This is an ultraportable from 1993, that boots MS-DOs and windows 3.1 from a PCMCIA ROM card. The model I purchased has a PCMCIA flash card instead of an HDD.

No moving parts, no backlight, greyscale monitor.

It was originally advertised to get 9 hours on a charge in this configuration. (it will also run on AAs, but got less runtime)

Shipping with some spare (but dead) batteries, so I'm going to rebuild them/have them rebuilt at a higher capacity.

I'm going to use a CF to PCMCIA adapter (with the acecard driver) for storage and file transfer, I'll also get the box hooked up to my raspberry pi retro-net over it's serial connection.

Depending on how I want to go about it, I could give it real networking, or just have the box connect to the pi as a TTY (and send/receive files) using the windows 3.1 terminal.

The laptop comes with MS WORD for Windows v2 (which I should be able to use to edit RTF files? And I'm pretty sure that most FOSS word processors can handle the "old" RTF standard and the "new" RTF standard, so I should be able to make that my primary word processor on this machine.)

If that ends up not working out, I'll have to find a layout/wordprocessing program for windows 3.1 that uses a filetype that still has modern support, but I'm sure there is one out there.

Anyway, I think that this is super damn cool.

This is going to be my primary machine for blogging, for Zines, and probably for email.

It is a computer for writing.

I may also use it for web development, or even general application/game development.

It is not a computer for consumption, and I'm even hesitating to install any games on it (not that many games would look good on it's 16 shades of grey VGA screen.)

I don't have the 486 or the printer yet, but I do have the 386 Omnibook, so I'm going to start working on that.

I haven't done a ton of work with the machine yet for four reasons: 1) I wanted to use rechargeable AA batteries with it, but the rechargeable batteries have a nominal voltage of 1.2v not 1.5, so the machine thinks it's dying as soon as I start it up.
2) I don't want to use the HDD it came with because they are rare and fragile