HP OmniBook 300
Claimed Object #10
I celebrated my 25th birthday in Kathmandu, part of a seven-month low-budget ramble in South and Southeast Asia. Upon my return home to San Francisco, anything related to Nepal got my attention.
Banana Republic was hosting Jeff for an event for his first book – Mister Raja’s Neighborhood: Letters from Nepal. Just off of Union Square, In the store’s basement, I met Jeff briefly and got a book signed. He was the writer and I was a fan.
For another birthday, nine years later, a friend gave me a copy of Jeff’s newly released The Size of the World. By this time, I had undertaken my second extended ramble in Asia – this one for 10 months. Arm chair travel via books by Jeff and others brought the world to me in between my trips.
While I had read Shopping for Buddhas, and thought it was fabulous, The Size of the World was something else altogether.
It was 1996 and the Web was in its infancy. As GNN, the Global Network Navigator, published Jeff’s dispatches from an around the world journey, I printed out every page for reading and posterity – not yet trusting that digital media would have staying power.
While Jeff was circling the world without airplanes in 1994, internet access was difficult or impossible in most places. Transmitting his dispatches to the GNN staff in California was an ordeal. And of course, he had to carry his own computer.
The HP Omnibook 300 was portable and relatively lightweight. With this device – and the increasing ability of accessing the internet globally – Jeff and GNN could do what couldn’t have been done before, thus establishing the world’s first blog.
In 1999, when I quit my job to embark on my own journey around the world (with airplanes as necessary!), I was inspired to take Jeff’s idea to the next level. Before leaving home, I developed a web-based publishing system so that I could self-publish from any computer at the cybercafes that were suddenly popping up all over the world.
It wasn’t until after that 14-month long journey, that I met Jeff for a second time – some 15 years after the first. As with the first meeting, it was in a bookstore. Unlike the first time, Jeff would remember this meeting, as it is part of the origin story of Ethical Traveler.
Since then – nearly 20 years now – I’ve had the great good fortune of Jeff’s friendship and the rewards of working alongside him on Ethical Traveler.
Several of the objects in 108 Beloved Objects speak to me in ways pertinent to my connections with Jeff – but none nearly as powerfully and significantly as the HP Omnibook 300.
While not the original, this particular Omnibook has symbolic significance – for travel history, for internet history, and most profoundly for me, for my own personal history with Jeff.
Gregg B., San Francisco, CA