233MHz Pentium MMX, 32MB RAM, 2MB C&T graphics, Yamaha OPL3-SA3 sound, 6x CD-ROM, 12.1" dual scan LCD. And a bunch of late 90s multimedia websites. Here's an archive of the Active Channels CD-ROM folder: archive.org/de...
I did warranty work on so many of those machines back in the late 90s. Fun fact. The Toshiba laptops from the 90s and 2000s with a 5 at the end of their model number are retail models. Ones that end in 0 were sold through places like CDW or other non-retail partners, often times in bulk orders. The warranty on retail models was less than the non-retail counter parts. The preloaded software differed as well.
@@LGRBlerbs in much of the 2000s I was the service manager at one of the largest (in volume) independent service providers in the US for Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo, Dell, Fujitsu and HP/Compaq laptops.
@@LGRBlerbs Twenty something years old BAT that retain 95% charge!!... Original stikers..... Come on Clint... You borrowed the time machine from @Techmoan... admit it... :-D
This was my first computer, and it was a hand-me-down from my dad. He left the first Civilization on it. I have fond memories of sitting in my room with this thing one afternoon, loading up that game for the first time, then looking out my window to see the sun coming up.
I have the original battery from the Dell Latitude CP M233ST (higher end version of this Toshiba, SVGA TFT display, much thinner body), still works for 45 minutes! But the good thing about these Latitude C series is that you can stick in a monster battery for a C840 and get like 4 hours of battery life on this thing!
I bought an older Compaq Evo laptop with a completely dead battery (only $20!). Using it with the AC adaptor wasn't bad but to my surprise replacement batteries were still made for it. After buying one, the Windows XP experience is now mobile and I love it
Fun video. People who never used these or won't around then can't fully appreciate the price/performance we get with today's laptops. These 90's models were heavy, weak screens with horrible refresh rate, slow HD's, etc. But all that said, it's still awesome to see one 20 plus years later and show what we had to use back then. Great vid as always.
@Raymond Thimmes Looked up your MacBook Pro and just shake my head that a more powerful 17.4" ASUS ROG Strix laptop that cost less than half as much in brand new retail price comparison... The Apple tax is just bonkers. Edit: Before anyone goes "but the software makes it worth it." Not really, there's stuff for Windows and Linux that's just as good, if not better and there has been for years.
@mike h Dynex DX-WGNBC I think, it had a win9x WiFi connection manager. I recall there was an issue with the brass bumps on end that he had to grind down, but it worked for what he used it for
@@Wolkebuch99 There is a WiFi card from Orinoco that works great in these, and it doesn't need any filing down either. These used a 16 bit PCMCIA slot. Cards like you described were 32 bit, and were designated as Cardbus. Anyway, I was able to make use of that 16 bit Orinoco WiFi card on a Satellite running 98SE Lite (that was 98SE with Internet Explorer completely stripped out), as well as a TI Extensa 486 laptop that was dual boot with both Dos 6.22 / Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Damn Small Linux. I really need to get the Extensa, Satellite, and the cute little Toshiba Protege restored and fully operational again one of these days.
Holy nostalgia! That was my dad's laptop back then. I remember plugging a phone line into that weird pop out PCMCIA rj-11 jack and dialing into the internet on it. I also would try to play space quest 4 but fail miserably since it had timing issues on it (those sequel police men on Pentiums are brutal!) Seeing it again in all of its chunky goodness is super cool. Love this channel! Also, I think those website files were there so that your internet explorer can have a prebuilt cache of the website and it'll actually load the same day while on a 56k modem xD
My mother still uses one of these for taxes/logging receipts - because the software doesn't exist on modern OSs there is no way to port the info over. This was also my first laptop, we got a dozen of these broken from a school that was throwing them out, managed to get 3 of them to work. I never got internet working though
@@DankRedditMemes They were certainly not! Quite good for laptop speakers actually. Sounds like Clints' have disintegrated over the years. I have a Satellite 320CDT that has the same issue.
@@Artyomthewalrus tell tour mom to back up her data regularly. And not just the data files, she should clone the hard drive and replace it with a new one asap
I had this exact model. I bought it (refurbished) in 1999 for $999 and was my first personally owned laptop. I used the hell out of it for work which involved me traveling around a lot and evaluating military units. The gray chassis looked vaguely military so it fit right in (after you take off the garish stickers). It was a lot more rugged than it looked. I deployed to Kuwait/Iraq with it in 2002-2003 for that war and it survived just fine in the bottom of my rucksack for 10 months. I used to write e-mails to my wife and send photos from my .33 megapixel camera when I had access to the internet. Still clunky, but better than using the mail system in terms of speed. Technology left it in the dust soon enough, but I kept it around to operate my RX-320 short wave radio since it was the only computer I had that still had a serial port that was required for the radio. Once I had a serial to USB adaptor, it became a paperweight. I finally had to get rid of it before a military move (to save weight) along with a lot of other stuff. Instead of recycling, I took it to the re-use portion of that facility. I hope someone picked it up and gave it to their kid or something. I have a lot of fondness for that computer.
That Warner Bros. website was painfully 90's. It reminded me of when I used to play flash games on the Cartoon Network website. I remember a Daffy Duck game where it was Duck Dodgers in space and you had to bounce the space ship around off the edges of the screen to collect and destroy things. I remember another Ed Edd n Eddy online multi-player game where it was supposed to be a water balloon or water gun fight. I don't think I ever got in a game with another player though. Good memories. Edit: I found a video of the Duck Dodgers game! m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ogXtDbokPaw.html
Not painfully 90's, AWESOMLY 90's. I really do miss the way the internet was back then. Even the anticipation you'd get from waiting for a website to load over dial-up.
Man those early 90's sites make me miss when we had web rings and just simple web pages. Now sites are all trying to cram video ads and massive 4k videos in the splash page of their sites and it just annihilates anything thats not a modern pc
Oh shut up lmao and take off your nostalgia glasses. 90s websites were cluttered to the brim with dumb decals and flashy, glittery shit they thought looked cool back then.
I recently had a older Motorola two way radio that needed to be programmed. The radio shop I went to had to dig this same beast out with a 100ft cord reel to program em. It was even running MS-DOS as well.
I remember these cd-rom-internet-things: we had one at the school i worked for so people could learn to use the internet without blocking the phone lines or topping up the bills for using it. It came with a full tutorial and was part of the secretary course. We had a laser disc systems too that was, kind of, interactive: you would get a question and than read a barcode of your answer to which the system would reply. High tech for the time but that was in 1998. I love these blerbs and videos of old stuff! Keep them comming Clint!!
I have a dark confession to make: sometimes I want to seal myself in a concrete bunker with a win 98 machine, some 90's tech and games, and pretend it's 1999 until all this blows by. Short of doing that, these blerbs keep me going.
@@crackwizard666 Every day that goes by i am sure you would miss out on less and less important/interesting/relevant things and spare yourself from loosing more faith in humanity. So its arguable if never getting out again would be such a bad thing.
@@KS-xo3oh yeah there are more moments you get asked to hang out with someone and the first thought is "I'd rather watch paint dry". I would have lost sanity without escapism.
Honestly tho I have the Toshiba sattelite from 2008 somehow that thing still works after replacing the fan and power jack runs hotter than hell and has been dropped down the stairs.. it's out lived every laptop I've had
The websites was apart of a CD that was around in late '97/early 98 that I think was called the accelerator pack, or something like that. You could get it from various stores for free to upgrade machines to IE 3 (or later 4) and a lot of the tech mags that also came with CDs bundled it. Other than the IE install it was just cached versions of websites to try out ActiveX in the IE 3 version and Active Channels in the IE 4 version.
"Active" internet is an IE4 technology. Microsoft came up with some new standards so users could have content downloaded from providers automatically. The content would be updated when the user was online. User could then choose "work offline" in IE to go through downloaded content like was a real website. This was useful then because internet meant dialup for most people and dialup meant no reading today's Cathy when mom was on the phone with grandma. IE4 also had Active Desktop that could update the desktop with web content. It was a huge resource hog and not really secure, but you could do it.
OK, you've done it. As a child I had a 486 for my first machine... I assembled it with my father. Time went by, things got bigger and better and that crap faded into the obscurity of my childhood memories, that was until you came along. Now, I'm all into legacy equipment again. Why!? I already manage a repair shop, so I encounter all kinds of crap but thanks to you, now I have a finer appreciation for it again.
I have two 320CDS that I refurbished, they're hardware identical to the 325CDS which was simply sold bundled with more software. I have owned a number of vintage machines over the years and have gradually trimmed down the collection and settled on these as my favorite machines. Why? I believe they're an outstanding "all-round" choice for vintage computing: 1. a nice compact footprint compared to desktops 2. All-In-One design with FDD, HDD, CDR, and all the conventional connection ports including USB, as well as 10/100 Ethernet possible with CardBus PC Card 3. can be run completely silently with an IDE to CompactFlash HDD adapter 4. can run early versions of DOS and Windows, with proper drivers available for Win 3.1, NT, 95, 98, and meets minimum system requirements for XP with 32MB extra RAM installed, can also run versions of OS/2 and Debian 5. real OPL3! 6. Still relatively easy to find and therefore tends to be somewhat cheaper than other vintage options, as well as parts being available After 1998 laptops gradually became larger in size, and the humble 3.5" FDD started to disappear as part of the onboard design, as well as lacking good driver support for older OS. Whilst the models before 1998 tended to lack something, whether USB, floppy, CDR, as well as having slower hardware. Put simply, the 320CDx series covers a lot of ground, straddling the transitional period between early and modern OS, and is great value today compared to other vintage computer options.
Aw man, watching this is nostalgia overload! Had either a very similar Satellite or one of the 500-series Tecras, probably from around 1996. My mom somehow brought it home from her job as a Cobol mainframe programmer, probably around 98/99 -- maybe they thought the hardware was too outdated idk. Was the first personal computer I ever had that wasn't a shared family computer! But the design and layout, the placement of the ports, etc were all very similar.
Oh man, I had to look up active channels and active desktop because it rang a bell when I saw it. All that DHTML stuff that the big studios were doing was really state of the art at the time. Most websites were pretty static.
I had the 325CDT with a dual height 10/100 PCMCIA Ethernet card. It lasted me about 5 years with various upgrades. The sound card was amazing as I could playback one track whilst recording another. Great as a playback/recording device in school music departments. It was, unfortunately stolen in around 2003/4 and the insurance company replaced it with a very poor Acer machine. I didn't realise how good the IR port was until a couple of years in to ownership when it would communicate with the office HP Laserjet over around 30ft. The built-in floppy drive allowed me to transfer MIDI files from the internet to my Yamaha Clavinova. It was upgraded in the end with 256MB of RAM and an 8GB hard drive that Windows XP saw as a single drive. Probably my favourite laptop of all time. Even better than my current DELL i7-7700.
That would have confused SOOO many people. "Margret, that compooter looky-box only got 4 of the giga memory ram bits and such. This'un over here has 'dem over 4 billion!".
My 2000 Tecra T8200 that I recently acquired still holds some charge, at least 30mins amazing really, the IBM A21m from the same era that I have only lasts a couple of minutes. I will say both are in pretty much mint condition which is amazing (no noticeable scratching, all labels intact, screens both still fine with no dead pixels), yet some similar machines were advertised with "damage appropriate for the age of the machines" which went for much more money.
More than likely it was always plugged in. The battery lasts longer if it's not allowed to discharge plus his a Lithium-ion which doesn't have the memory problems.
Simple technology lasts longer. One of the major reasons behind the slow uptake in tech in space. The only stuff that's "new" and goes up there is either 100% requirement, no other way around, or for personal use (cameras, laptops).
Hi LGR I have a 1998 Toshiba Satellite Pro 490XCDT and I love it! Win98 SE and 266MHz Pentium II and the battery is great and it has a Xircom combo 56k 100 lan card and a 13.3 inch TFT screen it is a great machine!!! Part of the palm rest is a bit loose of course. 96MB RAM and a 20 or 40 gig hard drive that is limited to 8GB due to BIOS limitations
First time watching a Blerb video and I have to say that it's everything I ever wanted. I love this casual, unedited style, so this channel is a big win in my book.
I worked in the configuration department at CDW from early 1997 until 1998 when I moved to tech support. I probably installed extra RAM into hundreds of these and other similar Toshiba laptops. Thanks for the walk down memory lane (pun intended).
My father gave me his old Toshiba Satellite when I was probably twelve after he had upgraded a couple times. It was a lot of fun to mess around with. I wish I still had it around.
My father had the Satellite 225CDS. I had the 115 - no sound card or CD Rom. My brother had one of these in high school and used to play Carmageddon on it. These were good machines. I have fond memories of playing Xwing vs Tie Fighter on my dad's computer...
Worked at the Support for Toshiba Nordics from 1995 to 2003, one of the best supports at the time, our commitment was to help the customers either to get software and hardware working or to help them restore machine in working order... supported all the models from Libretto to the flag ship Tecra, quite impressive when you get to work with a Tecra 9000 with fully packed Deskstation, SCSI and external disks, good speakers even in that and it mostly just worked , I still have a tablet model somewhere amongst my heap of machines. stirdy swivel hinge on that one, and it should still run :) You might just have inspired me to grab it and see if it works still :)
lol, tell me about it. Kinda wish Clint had tried to run Vipersoft, since I noticed there was a shortcut on the desktop for that. Funny to think that Henry Schein used to sell their own imaging software as well as PM..
I loved the 320CDS my sister's boyfriend left in the house. I used it in college (2007) for programming PICs via the parallel port, it clearly stole all the looks. I remember connecting it to a router via USB and getting to the internet that way. It played Quake1, snes9x, Doom and some other games pretty much ok. Some awful day they broke up and she took it from me. Years later I asked her if she still had it. She stored it in an attic, getting dust and humidity. The display got burnt and the charger got lost. Some people just don't appreciate old hardware
These were the standard computers we had in high school for our laptop program! I remember that giant gray brick of a computer. I hated that screen so much. As soon as I got home I plugged it into an old cheap monitor we had. So many memories of passing floppy discs back and forth on the bus with NES roms on it. Then our school got a T1 line for us and life was never the same again. I don’t think I’d be working in I.T. today if it wasn’t for having to constantly trouble shoot that thing and learning how to upgrade the hard drive and ram.
I worked for Computer City (RIP) back when these were sold, in the Corporate Sales Department. I sold so many of these to companies here in the Dallas / Ft Worth area. Man that brought back memories.
This model came out shortly after I got promoted to the tech shop at CompUSA. I upgraded and repaired SO many of these things. These were, for a "budget-conscious" retail consumer, probably the most durable laptops of the day. Only Apple and IBM made bigger tanks for retail consumers. Though it's interesting how over the years and changes in design processes, materials, and philosophies, things have gotten more or less reliable. Screen hinges, for instance, were terrible back then, and would break all the time. Not so much now. But the wire harness from the screen to the motherboard seemed to be a lot stronger back then, and keyboards were both better feeling and easier to replace back then. I do NOT miss those eraser-style trackpoints.
I agree modern screen hinges don't seem to be an issue with modern laptops. Instead the screw mounts just tear out of the chassis. Same with keyboards, it's just stupid when they're integrated with the top shell, which also happens to be the entire chassis on these thin systems. Lastly, I love using a good TrackPoint. I also hate using a bad one and unfortunately there are too many of those.
@@eDoc2020 My last laptop was permanently retired because of a keyboard issue. Couldn't find a seller that would sell the "entire part", they actually ripped the keyboard off of the upper chassis assembly with no way for replacement to actually happen. It's the dumbest thing on the planet. And of course, this was after the manufacturer (Dell) had stopped support so I couldn't just buy an OEM part.
I have a slightly older Compaq Armada 1560D, the battery holds a charge and keeps the computer on for at least two hours. I was blown away, usually after a few years any laptop battery holds a tiny charge at best. Here i can play games for an hour unplugged. Awesome thing with this compaq is the adapter is integrated in the case, it only needs a clover style wire.
I have a similar model Toshiba and the original battery still works. No bulging or leaking (thankfully). I was floored when I discovered the battery to be in working condition.
Got a Toshiba Satellite 320 CDT in amazing shape some months ago, these are great laptops for DOS gaming. Mine's battery also holds a charge, a whopping 2.5 hours, couldn't believe my eyes when I discovered that the battery was still in such good condition.
With the color and aesthetic appeal of a 90s airport lounge chair ;) My parents had a similar looking Compaq Presario at the time. I was 17 at the time. I managed to play Doom on it via serial cable with a body of mine
In high school, I was the only kid who brought a laptop to class for note-taking. I had a generic-brand Ultra 486-33 (starting in 1995), and then in 11th grade I upgraded to a Toshiba Satellite 205CDS, which looks like it predated your 325 by a year or so. I turned it on a few months ago, and it still works. I used that laptop through the first part of college. In fact, I don't think I used it in class (still, I was the only one in college using a laptop for notes) until mid 2005.
I definitely remember finding all those MIDIs from my dad's PC in the '90s but I never saw the accompanying websites. Amazing to see their intended context.
That’s almost identical to the one my grandpa used in the field as an electrician for about 15 years before he upgraded. That’s a neat machine and one heck of a workhorse for the time!
I still have my old PCMCIA Soundblaster Audigy card that I used back in college at the library when studying while headphoning. Definitely pushed some quality sound through
I had the same laptop around 2007. It was still running 95 though. It finally crapped out on me in 09. I ewasted it now I wish I had kept it with this video.
that's some pretty impressive CSS/HTML work for the late 90s there edit: and I'm sure there's a bit of flash mixed in there as well, surely. Those midi files are tight also o_0
I watched this video 2 years ago and here I am today coming back because I coincidentally coming across this same model for free. Mine too still somehow holds a charge but the screen is in rough shape! I'll end up refurbishing it and adding it to my collection.
Proud owner of a Satellite 4090CDS (Celeron, Win98SE) here, everything still works. The passive display sucks, you can see shapes burned in :D. And the best is, the battery actually can keep up for whopping 20 minutes :D. Its a great machine to play C&C, AoE and such on it.
Gooooood lord that ghosting. I had an HP for my first laptop, one of the first to offer DVD-ROM, solely to watch movies on car trips and play GTA. Thing ran hotter than a two dollar pistol and I remember needing some crazy inverter because of the amp draw, watching quick camera cut movies made me nauseous. I loved every minute of it.
I just bought a Toshiba Satellite 4025cdt, with a 300mhz Pentium 2, for myself for my 40th birthday. With the Yamaha OPL3 audio chip, DOS audio will be great! Going to set myself up the best DOS gaming laptop! Also, the listing for mine says it has an XGA Active Matrix, so the screen should look good!
Recently i got similar model: Toshiba 2530CDS. 64 MB of RAM and a Pentium MMX 233 MHz. One more for my personal laptop collection. Greetings from Mexico!
Oh we loved those Toshiba laptops! Once I brought a few in for VP's everybody had to have one, really bulletproof until guys started installing windows 2k on them! Even my BIOS programmers loved them.
During my first internship we had to image those type of things as they were the loan and back-up units my company worked with. Handled a lot of them; trustworthy machines.
I just ordered a really nice one from Russia. It has some weird customizations with it and it seems like it was kept up to date with maintenance for years. It’s super clean. They managed to put a DVD drive into it too.
I had one of these 20 years ago, loved it. Was a perfect little old work/ very light gaming laptop (for the games I played at the time, had a massive Transport Tycoon Deluxe addiction back in the day.)
That screen refresh rate! This is a pretty lovely laptop but I'm glad I have a roughly similarly spec'd Gateway for my retro computer needs of the era.
Toshiba was selling laptops at least through 2014/2015, but I have no idea whether they were still branded as Toshibas from that point on. They still used the Satellite model name then, too.