The most powerful laptop of 30 years ago, with a 12 MHz 286 CPU, two built-in ISA expansion slots, orange gas plasma display, and Alps mechanical keyboard. Batteries not included.
My dad was assigned one of these for his job in the Canadian federal government. He brought it home ostensibly for the ability to work remotely, but instead his teenage son (me) commandeered it. Once I saw that orange plasma screen light up, I was hooked. I taught myself C programming on that thing and used its 1200 bps modem to suit my BBS addiction, giving me a grounding in communications protocols and eventually the Internet. That computer gave me my career! Thanks Toshiba!
$5,799 for the base computer, $1,699 for a 3Mb expansion card, and $99 for the case... $7,597 + tax! Holy crap! That's $15,893 in 2017! Thank you for at least trying to show off that crazy screen!
And I look at my cute little $400 Laptop with it's 1Tb HDD, and 8 Gb memory and suddenly feel very grateful technology has evolved... BUT...Can't help but wonder what a future user will be using when they laugh at my tech....
@@prismstudios001 3yrs later for 400$ u can have a laptop with 500gb nvme ssd and 8gb ram 1080p ips display and ryzen 3 or i3 cpu. So not much has evolved. Specially in the battery and cpu department. 8gb ram on a 400$ laptop is completely fine but dual core cpu is still the same thing since like 2010.
Macbook Pro best laptop in the world? You sir, have been drinking the apple flavored kool-aid. Most expensive average laptop in the world is probably the only distinction it holds...there are far better and higher-powered laptops available for lesser or equal price.
One of my favorite computers; I used it as a consultant, lugging it into different work sites. While working for Northern Telecom, I installed boards that they were developing so I could document and test them. It had the best ergonomics of any portable computer I've ever owned. The screen and the keyboard were terrific; speed excellent. Sigh.
Back in that time frame I had Zenith laptops with nicad batteries. They weighed a lot too. When shutting down those machines, including my desktop computers, I used a utility that parked the heads first in the hard drive before it shut off. Can you imagine that there was a time you had to think of little things like that before it became built into the machine firmware and it parked them for you, thereby possibly avoiding a head crash. Things just got better and better. Great video!
Our CEO had this portable computer. When he upgraded to a newer Compaq laptop with a 640x480 color display, the T3200 was passed down to me to complete some tasks from home. It had a similar soft carrying bag, as seen in this video. Then the software I was using switched to Windows, and they considered the T3200 to be a boat anchor. I saved it from the trash, but I also haven't seen it in years. Not sure if it is buried in the basement or attic, or if was donated to Goodwill. Now this makes me interested to look for it again. I did come across two Tandy Model 100s when moving some stereo receivers in the basement last week, so maybe there is hope it is still around.
I have the same laptop at home, the first computer I ever used in fact. 286 12MHz with a whopping 4MB RAM. After a while I discovered the dsgsm utility which increased the plasma displays nuances - made ski or die look so much better.
These things were awesome. I used to travel around with the '386 version of this to do demos of a multiuser product. I needed the ISA expansion slot(s) for our async access hardware. Incredibly powerful and built like tanks. Expensive, yes. But it never let me down through all the hard travel I put it through.
The sound of that keyboard brought back (good) memories for me - I used one of these back in the day & they were a real pleasure to type on, if a little heavy to carry around (they got a little warm in use too, as I recall).
Oh wow, haven't seen this in a while - I actually had one of these as a child! Somebody was throwing it out around 1994 or so, gave it to me, and I used it, productively, until about the year 2000! Great keyboard, very readable screen, made it perfectly fine for writing homework, learning programming and a lot of hours playing SimCity over a decade after it was made!
in 1987 I was 25 years old and had a tandy coco III with a 5.25 floppy drive, I was uptown! however the T3200 was the penthouse oh the memories wounder what 1987 $5799.00 is in 2017 $s
I spent a summer at a co-op job on one of these things! I loved that plasma display! To this day the contrast is un-matched. Really enjoyed this thing.
My first Windows computer was a 1989-90ish T3200SX. That model was a 386 unit. These were part of Toshiba's "Portable Desktop" line. Many great memories behind that beautiful glowing orange display... I wish I could find another one.
There really weren't any portable computers in 1977, except the IBM 5100, which weighed 50 pounds: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9m54rKlErwA.html
A friend of mine while at college had one of these. Like me, He was studying for a computing science qualification part time while working. In his case, he was working for the Ministry of Defence, and was given one of these for his non classified work. He actually used it exclusively for college work, as he'd gone to college when requested to by the MOD. I got to play with it. It was a lovely machine, superior to the 286s we had in the computer lab, and definately superior to my computer, an Amstrad PC1512 I borrowed from my parents. My own computer was an Amiga 500, but I couldn't use this for study.
Warren Postma Actually there were a few companies that sold the little decals. They were printed on clear stickers, like tape, you would peel them off backing and place them on each key. The overlay stickers were available for all the popular software at the time. Word Perfect, Lotus, even VisiCalc. You did need to specify the version too since keyboard mapping often changed.
@@denshi-oji494 I've seen them for WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, but not much else, I'm not clear on what you meant by "all the popular software". Also Visicalc was first introduced in 1979 on the Apple II, was the "killer app" for Apple. Many, many small businesses and self-employed bought Apple II and IIe specifically to run Visicalc. Plus it was ported to CP/M for all the businesses that used microcomputers before the IBM PC came out. Also, CP/M on different micros were slightly different and incompatible, as were early versions of MS-DOS. (DEC, Tandy, and others had DOS for their particular machines) So it was not unusual for people switching from one computer to another to get a little lost, so there were overlays for the operating systems also. When Compaq made $11 million claiming their micro to be 100% compatible with the IBM PC, that's when everything changed and became standardized.
@@squirlmy not specifically IBM, but key stickers and keyboard overlays, and in some cases even replacement keycaps were available for many other computers for specific software. There were a few companies that it seemed the only product they made was these keyboard assistant labeling solutions. Visicalc was also sold for the Atari 8-bit computers. Loved it! I guess to me popular software at the time was application specific software that could be bought instead of writing it yourself... Yes, before the IBM PC hit market. Though even for a little while after the IBM came out, people were still writing their own applications quite a bit.
Double good! First Stewart Cheifet doing road warrior in an airport from Computer Chronicles followed by a review of my favorite luggable laptop before ThinkPads won me over: the Toshiba 3000 series. I had a 3100e with a 20MB HDD running Lotus Symphony and Lotus Agenda doing engineering work. Thanks for the video.
Cool! I used to have T3100e. Loved the keyboard and with a plasma screen I felt like I had something really futuristic back then. I had a modem in the expansion slot and even added a math co-processor to the CPU. Fun stuff.
I owned one of these (yes for work) and it was GREAT. Great blast from the past seeing it. I also owned a luggable with a built in printer which when you carried it, the bottom almost dragged on the floor. If you were under 5'10 you could not use the handle. Wish I could remember the name of that unit as well.
That boot sound, I used to have a "Pied Piper" work computer(don't ask the exact model, I won't remember for my life what it was), with a yellow monochrome display that had that same exact beep. Instantly took me back when I heard that.
I have a T3200 and a T5200. The latter is a 386 DX/33 machine with a 100 meg hard drive and 4 megs of RAM. It also sports an orange plasma display, upgraded to 640x480. There's a monitor port on it as well, which supports the typical VGA resolutions and color depths. Equipped with a sound card and CF adapter, it makes a really good late 80s-early 90s DOS gaming platform. It's my favorite retro system by far.
honestly, i would not mind if a modern laptop has no internal battery. most powerful laptops only last an hour or two without charging so theres really not much use for the battery. i use my laptop plugged in the whole time. i just use a laptop so i can bring it to school or a friends place without much afford.
jort93z most desktop replacements only have batteries so that they can be moved around without shutting them down. Having no battery would be a terrible idea.
Social User the asus rog zephyrus has a 70 watt hour battery life and still only lasts 2 hours due to the GTX 1080 it has inside. Laptops have a legal limit of 99 watt hours because the aviation regulations won't let them fly if they're larger. My gigabyte aero 15 has a 94 watt hour battery and gives me 7 hours at best with a 7700k cpu and a GTX 1060 GPU. What I'm saying is that batteries are rated for their capacitance, just because you have a large capacity doesn't necessarily give you longevity, it depends what components you have and how fast they drain your battery. Same reason the old nokias could last several days even though the phones of today only last a full day at best with the same capacity batteries.
Social User Gaming laptops are't "terrible laptops" because their battery life sucks, gaming laptops have terrible battery life because their components suck a lot of power. My point is that even if you stick the best battery in them you'll still only be getting a few hours on a full charge. It doesn't mean the laptop battery is any worse than those non-gaming laptop batteries that obviously last way longer due to having non-performance hardware.
How many batteries does yours have inside and do you know why it would have more than one? I have one that's been in my closet for decades that probably has leaked all over the place
@@eddie7319 The T3200 does not have batteries. It is AC power or nothing. It does have an internal CMOS battery. It's a non-rechargeable Li-Ion battery. If you decide to replace the capacitors, it will cost about $120 from Mouser Electronics.
Oh, now I see that it's an Ü, sorry! I might have missed this if you said it in the video but why did they use that plasma gas type screen back then? I mean what's the pros & cons of using one vs a "normal" one of the time and is it the "same" technique in the plasma TVs that was popular in early 2000? :)
Nice. I had one of these. Got it from my father when I started at the university. Used it with WordStar running on a ramdisk. The fastest wordprocessor ever, but maybe not the best :)
Didn't Toshiba just file for bankruptcy yesterday? EDIT: Found the article. It was Westinghouse, not Toshiba "The filing comes as the company’s corporate parent, Toshiba of Japan, scrambles to stanch huge losses stemming from Westinghouse’s troubled nuclear construction projects in the American South" (nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-toshiba-nuclear-bankruptcy.html?_r=0)
I did not know that Toshiba owned Westinghouse. I have a Westinghouse brand dishwasher that I think is actually made by Electrolux, so I wonder what the relationship is between Electrolux, Toshiba and Westinghouse.
ImRising. Lies. I use the best computer in the known universe, and still can't run Minesweeper even at the lowest possible settings... it just crashes.
I honestly think it would be cool if laptops with expansion slots would somehow make a comeback as a niche thing. I mean, come on, we already have crazy stuff with dual sli gpu's and whatnot anyways.
Great video! I have the later T3200SX model myself, picked it up at a thrift store a few years ago for around 10 dollars. Had DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 installed already and it's a great "little" performer! The 386 in it manages Windows pretty well. The biggest issue I've had is trying to find any compatible RAM for it. Being able to install a full Sound Blaster card makes it great for DOS games.
WoW $5799 in 1987 , now I regret selling it for £165 , which at the time I thought was a good deal. Then again I did give away my fully working DEC PDP, ( that could run BASi as an Op. System), 3 x RK-07 drives, over 100 disk packs, 100Kg of documentation and manuals, loads of accessories and add ons, terminals, boxes of cabling and wiring, custom cabinets and a tank track printer. That lot originally cost well over £750,000 and I even had the original receipts, service contract was £32,000/year. I do regret giving it away, however it did take up a full room in my house, used 5kW when running and seemed excessive for playing the network games I wrote with some mates, and it's now in the computer museum in Holland ( Amsterdam I think )
It appears far more portable than my IBM P70 systems. I love the gas plasma displays, they're very cool looking and quite easy on the eyes. It's also amazing how most of those displays still work/look the same now as when they came out of the box 30 years ago.
Lovely old machine. You've got the 40Mb Fujitsu hard drive in there. Note that these are NOT a standard IDE/MFM drive. Wish I hadn't sold mine...need to find another one to go with the T5200 and 3200SXC I have. T5200 is still used as a writing platform because I love the keyboard (Alps keyswitches from memory) and lack of distractions.
This brings back memories. The T3200 was my first transportable, that I was given when I started working for the local education authority. I used to run Foxbase and the Clipper xBase development tools on the machine. You also mentioned PC Anywhere, in a previous job within the authority, I worked on a council house sales system, the system was operated by two ladies who were based in one building but two days a week would go across to City Hall to face the public, we used PC Anywhere to dial back into their machines in the main office and access the house sales system. It actually worked pretty well.
I believe the minimum requirements for Doom is a 386 with 4MB of RAM. But you have to hit one of the F keys to put it in low detail mode to get a playable frame rate. I remember because I once played Doom on a 386 with PC speaker once upon a time. Crazy stuff.
The sound of that boot-up brings back prehistoric memories of my first PC, a 286. It (too) had WP5.1 and Quattro on it. That was back in the MS-DOS days. How computers have changed!
Linus needs to compare this to the dual 1080 ti/dual titan laptops he's been getting. These two machines share similarities like the mechanical keyboard, the absurd price from its time, and the weight.
Imagine in 2050 we will have a 13 inch dell xps laptop with a GTX 10,080 clocked at 1 million ghz with -50 nm transistors and a 500k monitor thats also 3D and support for mega VR with 5 million GB of GDDR100X Memory with 100 million cuda-mega cores and a 1 Billion GB SSD with speeds up to 500 million reads and writes. That my friends is the future if we keep advancing this fast!
well, Moore's Law's started to sputter. Intel quietly stopped setting target cpu density that high. So unless new CPU chemistry gets invented, 2050's going to better, but not staggeringly better, then 2020.
The future is a new computing medium. Molecular based computing or the esoteric "memristor" technology is going to be the next stage in computing technology (i.e. the same way our brains can crunch numbers and data). Quantum computing clearly isn't made to be portable so you're not going to be using personal quantum PC's any time in the near future.
I think computers will be more in the realm of quantum computers and artificial intelligence. Those will allow simulation of the whole universe to subatomic level, calculations of memory and speed would be virually infinite, a proverbial pocket universe
I just picked up a toshiba t1100 plus. Always wanted a computer from 1986. It’s in fully working condition although the hinges don’t feel the best (not sure if this is common from age or it’s like this) and I heard something rattling inside when I got it. Still for its age it’s in very good condition and works perfectly regardless.
I started with the Compaq luggable and used to carry it and a catalog case on airplanes. I ended up with tennis elbow in both arms. I later got a Toshiba T3100, the T3200's little brother. It was a great machine.
Back in the day, before I would shut down my machines, particularly my Zenith laptops, I would use the head parking command to protect the hard drive. Great video. I am so glad all that tech is a fading memory for me, as I am spoiled by what we have today.
I still have mine over here. I bought it used though over here. LOL a great little guy for it's day. I still show it from time to time to show what it looks like. Some of my friends are shock when looking at it.
That orange screen tho, starting that old of a laptop up, and the orange screen and text, reminded me of Portal's "Still Alive", nice job reviewing that computer too, looks like it's pretty ahead of it's time.
I used to use one of these at work as a trainee accountant. They were large and fairly heavy so while you could move them around, you wouldn't want to carry one of these around all the time. Slightly spookily it had almost all the same software on it such as WP5.1, Quattro Pro, Lotus Express but the one I liked the best was XT Gold file manager.
Just FYI from an engineers life: That Toshiba was a common portable for PLC programming in manufacturing plants. While I'm sure there were lots of "lug-able" PCs out there, GE made one for their series 6 line of PLCs that was very, very common.
Very cool video! This was actually the first computer I ever owned. Just like the computer in the video, it had a 286 processor, 1 megabyte of memory and a 40 megabyte hard drive. My computer also had an expansion card modem, even though I never got it to try it. There was no Internet and I did not know about any BBS. I got the computer from my grandfather when his company got rid of some old computers. I think it was in 1992 and even then the hardware was completely obsolete as I remember it. It was nothing like having a five year old computer today and it barely ran Windows 3.0. Games? Yeah right... Despite the severe limitations, I was still very happy owning it. It forced me to learn MS-DOS inside and out and I have benefited from that ever since.
Interesting video. My first PC was a similar ex corporate Toshiba T3100 bought in about 1993 for £250. I then added MS Works for Dos for another £100. I kept it until the hard drive died. The drive had a non standard connections so I couldn't find a replacement. The plasma display was superior to any LCD back then. Remember the "Mouse Trails" feature so you didn't loose the pointer when you moved the mouse on an LCD.
I still have my T3200SX. I had installed a larger hard drive, Super VGA card, external keyboard, 5-1/4 external floppy drive, joystick and put Windows 3.1 on it.
I have a T3100SX which is a newer model of a T3100 series, which got 386SX processor and memory expandable up to 13 MB! Mine has a whopping 8MB, which must have cost a fortune when it was new. Anyway, it was rescued from being thrown away by my colleague around 2001. It had pretty much dead PSU and batteries (yes, it was one of the first ones with batteries), so it was rigged to power from standard Molex +5/+12 with AT power supply. It doesn't look good, but it works. The keyboard on mine doesn't feel that good though. I couldn't remove the cap to see the switch. The best part about it is the display. SX version have 640x480 panel, and VGA-compatible graphics adapter (I've just read that it's also Hercules compatible, should try this out). In the 90s I had amber-color mono CRT display at one time, and I quite liked it. This one is more red, but the perfect geometry and nice warm glow is also quite nice. I've used this machine for reading books off this screen for a few years. Sadly HDD was near death when I got it and it only got worse. FDD is also finicky. I wish I could yank the display off of it, connect it to something like Raspberry Pi...
A video of the DIY luggable would be very cool. It would be interesting to know what happened to the company and how well this sold. Modular laptops need to become a real product. There is so much waste in this area. Thank you for an informative video. I'll check out your other ones.
The reason for the screen "not taking up the full width" is because, as it says in the advert, the display is Hercules compatible and has a resolution of 720x400 pixels. EGA is only 640 pixels wide (by either 350 or 200 pixel height). That's most likely why you have the 40 pixel space on either side.
I remember these well. They had a color model with a TFT display -- thinking it was a 386 model. I wanted one soooooo bad. Used to see these in the giant magazine Computer Shopper all the time. I loved that catalog.
I remember we had little Microsoft laptops we used every once in a while to play small computer programs in elementary school😢 who knows what they did with all those laptops after they were considered outdated
@Daybot Apple IIs are really not that rare. They're a little hard to find, but not that rare. I have 3 of them. Two Apple II+ computers, and an Apple IIe. I bought all of them within the past couple of years or so. You just have to look on Craigslist, and aps like LetGo, OfferUp, etc to find local sellers in your area. Stay away from eBay. People there charge ridiculous hipster prices, and of course the shipping cost would be murder.
I can't help but feel a little bit like Scotty from Star Trek when he has to use an 80's computer. "How quaint!" It's amazing how far we've come in computing over the last 30 years. Its humanity's biggest accomplishment. If only humanity had put as much work into other aspects of life such as protecting the environment or social progress, we'd be living like in Star Trek by now.
oh man my day is now complete hearing a very much almost 8 bit rendition of the overture if you ever had end titles were ppl click on other vids boom there is your music i love it!
Wow it's amazing how little spreadsheet programs have changed....not that there is really much need to improve the layout of the main workspace in one.
