HP OmniBook 800CT
So, you’re building a miniature laptop but have no more space to put a touchpad under the keyboard. What do you do? You could force people to buy a mouse, or you could go the route of HP and create a pop-out mouse. Hidden in a small compartment on the right side of the HP OmniBook 800CT was a strange, wedge-shaped mouse that would unclick from the chassis when you pressed a cute little mouse button.
Wireless wasn’t an option back in the mid-‘90s so the tiny mouse hung on by a thin rubber cord. This novel way of working around a problem that plagued many laptops of the era actually worked, and HP went on to use the pop-out mouse in a few different models.
On the topic of touchpad integration, we should shout out the Compaq LTE Elite 486, a vintage laptop with a trackball integrated into the lid to the right of the display.
