Toshiba T1100 – the laptop that was named a milestone of electronic engineering | Hacker News Reader

Toshiba T1100 – the laptop that was named a milestone of electronic engineering

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182 pointsDmitryElj74 comments

I 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.

I 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

Yes! I forgot about Battle Chess!

Best version was on the Amiga: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1072739559

if you liked NC you will love Total commander (windows only unfortunately)

For Linux, there’s Midnight Commander.

Gentoo 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.

Or Directory Opus. I preferred the version 3 approach with two side by side directories, but the current version is ridiculously configurable.

There is a whole host of orthodox dual-pane file 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.

For macOS, there's Marta, made by someone I know.

Dos Navigator was way better than Norton Commander.

XTree!

Xtree gold. And LapLink.

I was watching an old sitcom recently (Newsradio) and the prop computers on the set all appear to be running xtree.

And the text editor Brief [1]. I used this in my first uni holiday job in 1988...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)

I still miss its keystrokes: one 'Home' for start of line, a second 'Home' for top of page, a third 'Home' for start of file.

There is an open source clone: https://sourceforge.net/projects/grief/

Thank you for that!

Yes Xtree! Oh my major flashback...

I 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.

For 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).

"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)

(not only does it not support x64, but it never even supported 32-bit from the looks of it!)

I used to use debug on win2k PCs in my school to futz with the VGA card as a kid. Good times.

I 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.

I used Debug as a real assembler. List of symbols was directed to debug and resulting code was executed directly.

"(defun fib2 ..." is an example what kind assembly code was needed. It is a recursive fibonacci written in assembly.

https://github.com/timonoko/nokolisp_addons/blob/master/asse...

Growing 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

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUTOEXEC.BAT

3. https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-desk-2002.jpg

>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

> 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).

At least on CP/M WordStar loaded in an overlay for printing. It fit on a 90KiB floppy including the overlay and CP/M.

A 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.

Beating the trend for no-distraction word processors by decades!

In 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 to edit my website and to read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. See: https://www.iwriteiam.nl/Computers.html#T1000 for more details.

I'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.

One nitpick on the article, it covers the later T1100 Plus. The original T1100 was a beast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100

8088 vs 8086, twice as slow, only one floppy and dos 2.11

I 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.

The 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.

I'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.

The 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.

Oh 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!

I 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 :)

I 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

How did you get the output into something printing-press friendly?

Laser printer, one of the early ones. They had a whole language for the printer drivers and awesome support.

The 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).

Sure, but no floppy disk drive or headphone jack? Completely impractical.

Today, according to inflation, would cost $4,905.42.. or it would cost less than it costed then, thanks to improved manufacturing/markets? ;o

I 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.

Two 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 :)

It 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?

As 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.

I 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 2: https://home.jeita.or.jp/page_file/20140219114214_dP3lbRxp9F... 3: https://panasonic.biz/cns/pc/prod/note/jeita.html

I 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.

I remember the libretto line, it was jaw-dropping as a teenager, I really wished to have the money to buy it at that time..

Had 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://archive.is/gFVNm

I miss laptops with full travel keyboards. Totally wouldn't want the bulk now, but I still miss them.

I 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.

Funny how only a couple of years made a huge difference. My first portable was an Atari Portfolio :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio ( 1989 ). MSRP $400.

Oh, that keyboard…

Clack!

I wish this was a priority now.

Ha! They even managed to include Commodore into the article.

Boy, 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!

Archived: https://archive.ph/gFVNm

I knew someone that had one of these or something very similar. He played the Indy 500 DOS game on it sometimes.

I wish I had saved my T3100. That machine felt like the future...and still looks the part.

The 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.

Basically it was the first computer one could reasonably call portable.

By “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

We'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.

I got my "portable" computing start by travelling around South Asia with a Sharp PC-5000 (1983; 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.]

Oh 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.

That'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.

> 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.

I always wondered what I should call the TRS 100/Kyocera type non-foldable portable computers (and now the arm powered DevTerm) and I kinda settled on "A4 computers" since they're apparently about that size.

You could use it standing up, like you can use a modern laptop standing up. I don't think your comparison is fair.

The keyboard was wider than many modern laptops, so typing would be done with one hand, other under the device.

No one really used it unless on desk, as I recall.

My 10th grade computer teacher had one, so I'm dating myself here...

Man, the envy we all had for it, heh.

It 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.

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