HP-95LX palmtop personal computer: A blast from the recent past?

[jebem]

Recently I saw this machine for sell at a local auction site.
Not working condition. Sold as is. Manual included. No returns.

This brought me memories from the good old days when the IBM PC DOS 1.0 was a kind of a new frontier in "affordable" computation.
At the time I was working for WANG Computers and we also had our Wang PC on the market and despite not being compatible with the IBM PC BIOS, it run Microsoft DOS 1.22 initially and was more powerful thanks to a real 8MHz 16-bit 8086 processor and a more advanced I/O architecture.

Well, the HP-95LX English User's Guide alone is worth the asking money, so I bought it.
It arrived today.

The printed manual surely is the heaviest I own from HP - 960 Grams!
Adding the Quick Reference Guide and I have got more than 1 Kg of printed paper!

After a brief inspection I saw the problem: Battery corrosion once again caused contact isolation.
Just for testing, I cleaning the contacts just enough to make sure the power supply would not be the root cause.
Plugged in two AA batteries and voilà, it booted nicely!

How simple the world was in the 80's.
An small OS (for Microsoft, that is), probably only beaten by my Sanyo 64KByte CP/M OS running on a Z80 processor.


Battery corrosion ugly head:




Self Test passed with flying colors (Esc + ON):




And the so called Easter egg inside the self test procedure: