Hewlett-Packard Omnibook 300

Oakland, 1993

In November 1993, before I left my Oakland flat to circle the world without airplanes, I was gifted an OmniBook 300. The understanding was that I would use it to write short tales of my travels, which would then be sent by modem to California and featured on GNN: The Global Network Navigator, a pioneer of the World Wide Web.

The OmniBook 300 was the first ultra-light laptop. It weighed 2.9 pounds, had a full-size keyboard, a 9-inch monochrome screen, and a little mouse that popped out from the side. It came bundled with Microsoft Word and Excel. Incredible. Adorable. Indispensable. Most amazing, it could run all day on four AA batteries. See above: There I am on March 6th, my 40th birthday, writing a blog from the Mars-like hell of the Mauritanian desert.

A few weeks later, at a café in central Turkey, a young mystic named Ishmael read the grounds at the bottom of my coffee cup. He predicted disaster: “You will lose your best friend,” he warned. “Your confidant. The one you trust with your deepest secrets.”

Sobering news, but my journey continued—through Syria and Saudi Arabia, from Dubai into Pakistan. By late May, I was on an overnight bus from India to Nepal. I slipped my daypack into the overhead rack, and dozed off. When we stopped for a toilet break in the middle of the night, my pack was gone: stolen. Inside was my OmniBook, with a month’s worth of detailed, intensely personal writing. Ishmael’s prediction had come true.

Dismayed, I paid for a week of ads in The Kathmandu Post, in Nepali, offering a large reward, no questions asked, for the laptop’s return. No luck. At that point I visited a doctor friend in Kathmandu and asked him for Prozac. He shook his head. “This isn’t chronic,” he explained. “You have every reason to be depressed.”

I bought a used laptop form a friend in Nepal, and did my best to rehash everything that had happened to me in Arabia, on the Gulf of Oman, and through Pakistan and India.

After I returned to the U.S., Hewlett Packard sent me a second OmniBook. I haven’t used it since 1997. In my estimation, this ingenious relic belongs in an industrial design museum.

Any place, really, besides the bottom of my closet.