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Toshiba T1100 – the laptop that was named a milestone of electronic engineering
- fit2rule 5y ago
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoThe article doesn't seem to answer the question it has on its headline.. instead it just goes through banal details of the hardware and software.
- bobsmooth 5y agoBasically it was the first computer one could reasonably call portable.
- Lio 5y agoBy “computer” you surely just mean MS-DOS computer. TRS-80 Model 100 was released in 1983 predating this. The original Kyocera design was originally released in japan in 1982. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
- simonh 5y agoWe're running into terminology territory which is rarely productive, but let's go with it. There are multiple reasonable takes on this so I'm not looking for a fight, but for me I'd classify the Model 100 as a mobile devices. It's a bit on the large side for that classification, but no more so than a modern tablet except for the thickness, and you could conceivably us it standing up. For me a portable computer is one that needs a table or lap to use (can't reasonably be used standing up) and replicates the capabilities of a desktop computer in a more compact form. The T1100 is beaten out on that definition by the Osbourne, though arguably that's in it's own 'luggable' category. I think the T1100 is almost certainly the first computer we could call a laptop though.
- jfk13 5y agoI got my "portable" computing start by travelling around South Asia with a Sharp PC-5000 (1983; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000) in a briefcase. Those were the days...! [edit: And what did we do with such a machine? Created text-editing/printing software for scripts like Devanagari, Urdu, and more.]
- indymike 5y agoOh wow. I a Sharp PC-5000 to write software (that would be sold with a PC-5000 as part of the package) that interpreted data from primitive vascular ultrasound and angiodynography machines. It had a built in printer that wasn't the fastest, used a bizarre "bake on" thermal ribbon, but was higher quality and larger than the built in printers in the lab equipment. Was completely obsolete one year later.
- jfk13 5y agoThat's also very cool, despite being superseded. Amazing the things a primitive machine could do. Yeah - the Sharp's (optional) built-in thermal printer was much higher resolution (with a 24-dot print head, resulting in around 200dpi IIRC) than most dot-matrix impact printers of that era (8- or 9-pin print heads, 70dpi or so), but the thermal ribbons it used to print on plain paper were hard to come by. You could also use it with thermal paper, but the resulting printouts tended to fade quite quickly (somewhat depending on the environment). We were thrilled when we managed to get hold of 24-pin impact printers that produced more permanent output, and where we could re-ink the ribbons. Produced camera-ready copy to publish books with those for several years, designing "oversized" fonts that were printed using multiple passes, and then photo-reducing the printed output to boost the effective resolution.
- indymike 5y ago> but the thermal ribbons it used to print on plain paper were hard to come by. We bought them by the 1000. Each ribbon could only print 5 images, so our customers burnt through them. I bet we made more money on selling ribbons than software :-) Was my fist software development job... so I have a warm spot for that machine.
- adrian_b 5y agoIt was only the first reasonably portable computer that did not have an astronomical price, so it was accessible for many people. The first reasonably portable computer was the GRiD Compass "briefcase computer" (i.e. that could be carried inside a briefcase; the word laptop was coined later), which was introduced in April 1982. GRiD Compass was the first portable computer made in the clamshell format now used by any laptop and the first portable computer with a flat display instead of a CRT (it had an electroluminescent display). GRiD Compass looked like a modern laptop (unlike all the previous portable computers, which were large boxes with handles, usually compared with portable sewing machines), but it did not have an internal battery, it had to be used with an external power inverter where mains power was not available. It used an Intel 8086 CPU, but it was not compatible with the IBM PC, as it had different peripherals. Because it was extremely expensive, it was typically used by customers with deep pockets, e.g. the NASA Space Shuttle and special missions of the US military or CIA.
- zik 5y agoI had a Toshiba T1200 way back. It was the successor to the T1100 with a slightly faster 80C86 processor, more memory and a 20MB hard disk. It was awesome in its day.
- icambron 5y agoThe T1200 was -- and I never thought much about how weird this is until now -- my family's computer for a few years. We got a laptop for somewhat arcane reasons and I'm not sure it was the right decision, but my dad loved that thing. I learned WordStar and some drawing program, but we didn't have games, so I didn't use it much. It lasted us until 1995 when we got a PC with Windows 95, our first Windows computer.
- jinto36 5y agoI've got a T1200XE which runs at a staggering 12 MHz but has the same form factor and monochrome screen, which was a leased business system from my father's job that they ended up letting us keep. The last couple of times I took it out the hard drive took a whole bunch of power cycles to get it spinning, probably the bearings sticking. That was a while ago, so next time might require some disassembly to get it going again. As others have mentioned, the keyboard is pretty nice on these. The T1200XE also has a modem, so I used it with Prodigy for DOS for a while along with BBSes and such. It's a shame Toshiba wasn't able to keep their lead in portables, they had a bunch of innovative products.
- transitory_pce 5y agoThe T1000 is legendary too. It’s pure mimetic liquid metal, meaning it can transform into anyone or anything (provided that it isn’t a machine with moving parts).
- simonh 5y agoSure, but no floppy disk drive or headphone jack? Completely impractical.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zkirill 5y agoI thought that nothing could made me feel more nostalgic than seeing Norton Commander but then I saw Battle Chess. Earlier today I was reading about the history of ThinkPad and found this gem on Wikipedia: "ThinkPads have a distinct black, boxy design language, inspired by a Japanese bento lunchbox, which originated in 1990 and is still used in some models."[1] I miss those days. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad
- iancmceachern 5y agoYes! I forgot about Battle Chess!
- G3rn0ti 5y agoBest version was on the Amiga: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1072739559 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1072739559
- yread 5y agoif you liked NC you will love Total commander (windows only unfortunately)
- anon_123g987 5y agoThere is a whole host of orthodox dual-pane file managers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Dual-pane_managers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Dual-pane_manager.... On Linux, I'm using GNOME Commander, and Midnight Commander in the terminal. On KDE, Krusader is the greatest.
- teddyh 5y agoFor Linux, there’s Midnight Commander.
- timbit42 5y agoGentoo is a great Linux dual-pane file manager, but they should change the name to not conflict with the Linux distro of the same name.
- W-Stool 5y agoI owned a new one of these back in the day. Took it on an airplane to do some database input (bingo card leads from Dr. Dobb's) using PC-File for a MicroISV I was running at the time. Passengers looked at me like I was someone from the future. As one of my products was a high resolution (microsecond) timing library for MSDOS this thing also found its way to a few race tracks when I owned and raced a Lola Formula Ford. To say I got my money out of something like this, impossible to believe now, was an understatement.
- mikewarot 5y agoI was in the room with Ward Christensen when he got his later model (with a hard drive) Toshiba out of the box and realized he had no 3.5" drives on his other machines, and thus no way to get data to it. He hacked together enough of Xmodem in debug to try to download Qmodem (I think) via serial port, from another machine and after a few tries it was off to the races. This will always sit in my mind as one of the greatest hacks of all time. Total time elapsed was less than half an hour.
- pavlov 5y agoFor those who didn’t grow up in MS-DOS, “debug” was the absurdly limited assembler that shipped with the operating system, and was the only development tool available on a fresh install (apart from BASIC).
- kingcharles 5y ago"debug" was truly the devil's spawn. Yet, it was always there. You always needed it at the time you had no other tool available, so you had to struggle through. Therapy was mandatory after any use of that utility. Looks like Windows XP was the last version to ship with it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command) (not only does it not support x64, but it never even supported 32-bit from the looks of it!)
- boondaburrah 5y agoI used to use debug on win2k PCs in my school to futz with the VGA card as a kid. Good times.
- vikingerik 5y agoI used debug to write some moderately serious (~5k lines of code) toy programs in assembly. It worked. Labeling it with insults is historical revisionism; it was part of the basic toolkit for how you hacked around on DOS computers of the time. I learned a ton about low-level computer operations from using debug. It's more than an assembler, it's also a runtime environment with breakpoints and a debugger, and a hex editor. It really manipulates everything going on with the computer at a byte-by-byte level. I wouldn't have learned all that quite the same way from any "real" tools like MASM or the Norton debugger.
- neilv 5y ago> The next fascinating application is the WordStar 3.30 -- it's a pretty simple text editor, and its size is less than 100KB. WordStar 3.3 was a popular word processor at the time -- you could write books on it, and print to character-based printers. There was also a "Mail Merge" add-on, for doing mailing labels and customized letters from a database. I used WordStar (IIRC, 3.3) on MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.11, on a PC semi-compatible. Regarding 100KB (for the `.COM` file? RAM?), I can't remember whether WordStar used overlay files to swap in code. But it fit on a 160KB floppy, and ran on a 128KB RAM MS-DOS machine. I also used the less-known CalcStar spreadsheet software (which was overkill for the accounting needs of my adolescent lawn-mowing business, and then a tiny shrinkwrap software business).
- kragen 5y agoAt least on CP/M WordStar loaded in an overlay for printing. It fit on a 90KiB floppy including the overlay and CP/M.
- tass 5y agoA Song of Ice and Fire was written on Worstar for DOS, and I believe it’s the only editor the author uses for book writing.
- simonh 5y agoBeating the trend for no-distraction word processors by decades!
- Torwald 5y agoHa! They even managed to include Commodore into the article.
- causi 5y agoI've always found laptops with hinges that aren't exactly on the back edge to be deeply aesthetically satisfying. Perhaps it's an echo of a sports car with the engine in the back.
- Underphil 5y agoI miss laptops with full travel keyboards. Totally wouldn't want the bulk now, but I still miss them.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI rarely use any laptop without the full size keyboard I lug around along. Started doing that when one had a few keys not working, continued when I realized how much better it is.
- Foobar8568 5y agoI remember the libretto line, it was jaw-dropping as a teenager, I really wished to have the money to buy it at that time..
- lnxg33k1 5y agoToday, according to inflation, would cost $4,905.42.. or it would cost less than it costed then, thanks to improved manufacturing/markets? ;o
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- caslon 5y agoIt surprises me that people find the battery life here especially impressive. Battery life is the one thing that has almost constantly been declining for decades now. Much simpler chips, much simpler displays, and significantly fewer radios made it possible to have computers that barely sipped power. How often did you have to charge your handheld console as a child?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nicoburns 5y agoAs far as laptops go, there's been a big increase in battery life over the last couple of decades. The latest macs can get close to 20 hours (and there are windows laptops that aren't far off that). My 2007 Toshiba only offered 2.
- numpad0 5y agoI think this isn't documented extensively in English - there was a very flawed protocol called the JEITA 1.0 method used by every Japanese laptop manufacturers to measure battery life as an average of high power state and idle state, circa 2001-2014. It measured _high_ power state by playing back a supplied 320x240 MPEG1 video file at LCD brightness of more than 20cd/m^2(20 nits) until battery cuts off, which was hardly representative of idle state well before 2014. When long overdue revision was made that year it bumped up load to an FHD H.264 file with minimum 150 nits with Wi-Fi connected but still hardly a high power state or representative of typical use case. Sort of a tragedy of commons. Apple started ignoring JEITA method for laptops at some point, I think ever since the Intel switch, and I remember it taking years for their unusually short advertised battery life to be not taken as an exaggeration of absurdly underwhelming performance, but simply a more down to earth measurement. Only then the actual battery life of laptops started growing to today's actual-all-day length. Your Toshiba from 2007 is likely from this JEITA era, and likely has brochure spec of 8 to 12 hours by JEITA, just like a modern laptop would say 6 to 10 hours of web browsing. So, battery life is theoretically worsening over these decades, and rapidly improving in actual terms. Refs: 1: https://home.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/page/detail.cgi?n=84 https://home.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/page/detail.cgi?n=84 2: https://home.jeita.or.jp/page_file/20140219114214_dP3lbRxp9F.pdf https://home.jeita.or.jp/page_file/20140219114214_dP3lbRxp9F... 3: https://panasonic.biz/cns/pc/prod/note/jeita.html https://panasonic.biz/cns/pc/prod/note/jeita.html
- mitchbob 5y agoArchived: https://archive.ph/gFVNm https://archive.ph/gFVNm
- fjfaase 5y agoIn 1996, I took a second hand Toshiba T1000 with me on our trip to China. I remember using Qedit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_SemWare_Editor#Qedit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_SemWare_Editor#Qedit to edit my website and to read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. See: https://www.iwriteiam.nl/Computers.html#T1000 https://www.iwriteiam.nl/Computers.html#T1000 for more details.
- discatte 5y agoOne nitpick on the article, it covers the later T1100 Plus. The original T1100 was a beast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100 8088 vs 8086, twice as slow, only one floppy and dos 2.11
- Brajeshwar 5y agoGrowing up in the 90s in a remote corner of India, anything electronic was utter amazement for most of us. During the early 90s, in between schools and classes, I helped out with the very few computers in the whole of our town. I was quickly known to be the kid that knows computers. My first encounter with a laptop was a big IBM portable that came with a tiny square screen (must be less than 6-inch - similar to the Osborne-1 from the article) that finally reached me to help fix. It was donated to a Church group by visiting American missionaries. I took it home, kept it for a week -- most of the time just looking at it and the whole locality coming to the room just to have a look at a COMPUTER. I had no camera, and so no record but that was something I will never forget. I did fixed the issue (I think), WordStar[1] and DOS (autoexec.bat[2] error or something), in the first few hours of getting the device. I earned and bought my first own Laptop and it was an IBM Thinkpad Series in 2001/2002[3]. I think I have a very low-res picture somewhere for this one. Since, a few years back, I'm stepping away from carrying a Laptop wherever I can avoid. Edit: Found the picture. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUTOEXEC.BAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUTOEXEC.BAT 3. https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-desk-2002.jpg https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-desk-2002.jpg
- 123pie123 5y ago>anything electronic was utter amazement for most of us growing up in the UK, this was the same for me - and it still amazes me now
- darkwater 5y agoOh PC Globe!! I totally forgot about it!! I remember printing flags with my IBM pin printer at the most utterly low resolution, it was more fun than playing videogames!
- the-dude 5y agoFunny how only a couple of years made a huge difference. My first portable was an Atari Portfolio : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio ( 1989 ). MSRP $400.
- KaiserPro 5y agoI have my Dad's one, I think its a slightly later model. It still works, the only thing is I've taken the batteries out, as if they leak, its a pain in the arse to clean up. I did that last year, and surprisingly they were intact after 30 ish years. There is a boat load of space in the expansion port, so I'm tempted to put in a pi for both FDD emulation and connectivity.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoI like how they say WordPerfect 4.1 “ editing features are pretty basic” - it was a full-featured word processor and probably the most feature-rich one of its time :)
- h2odragon 5y agoI laid out full length books in WP4, and many issues of magazines. We had WP 5 by the time we were doing the TV guide with the "prime time grid" all made with WordPerfect macros from text inputs
- wolverine876 5y agoHow did you get the output into something printing-press friendly?
- h2odragon 5y agoLaser printer, one of the early ones. They had a whole language for the printer drivers and awesome support.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- forgotmypw17 5y agohttps://archive.is/gFVNm https://archive.is/gFVNm
- marcodiego 5y agoTwo floppy drives and a serial port... Maybe it is possible to hack the "boot" drive with a floppy emulator and put FreeDOS on it modify autoexec.bat to turn the computer into a serial terminal when it is powered on; remove the other floppy drive and stuff an ARM SBC inside it, connect it to the terminal using the serial interface. Small linux ARM laptop :)
- joezydeco 5y agoI wish I had saved my T3100. That machine felt like the future...and still looks the part.
- cobrabyte 5y agoBoy, this is nostalgic. My dad had one of these, and I remember writing BASIC programs on it. Nothing of value, but it sure did impress dad!
- prosaic-hacker 5y agoI have the T1000 in my storage closet under the stair. (with SWTP CT-82 and Cat Novation acoustically coupled 300 baud modem. The T1000 had a boot Rom disk with DOS 2.11 on it. I had a memory upgrade to 512 or 640K which I used as ram disk and loaded files from the single floppy. Ran Turbo pascal on it, probably version 3-ish. Got go do some computer archaeology and resurrect it.
- sspiff 5y agoThe hard drive equipped T1200 was the first computer I ever used. We had two of them at home as a kid after they were discarded by the ministry of public health where my dad worked as a clerk. I had so much fun playing Keen on the slow blue-only LCD display, and just drawing stuff in Paint on Windows 3.11. Sadly, I discovered as a teenager my mom (who never throws out anything, not even old newspapers) threw both of them out in perfectly working condition. I still get sad thinking about that.
- nullsmack 5y agoI knew someone that had one of these or something very similar. He played the Indy 500 DOS game on it sometimes.
- jdkee 5y agoHad a TRS-80 Model 100, made by Kyocera. Was a wonder, exceedingly portable, good battery life and great keyboard. Screen real estate was a bit limited, but usable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
- tomcam 5y agoOh, that keyboard…
- rpmisms 5y agoClack! I wish this was a priority now.