Toshiba has been showing off some interesting notebooks recently, including a model with dual touchscreen displays and one with an NVIDIA Tegra chipset running Google Android. But Toshiba’s been putting out notebooks for a long time… 25 years in fact.

At the same event where I got to check out the company’s dual screen prototype last night, Toshiba had another innovative model on hand… the Toshba T1100 which was released in 1985.

Notable for its dual floppy drives, allowing you to easily copy disks, this 9 pound laptop had a blazing fast 4.77MHz processor and ran DOS 2.11. Good times. You can check out a few more photos after the break, including my favorite: a shot of the T1100 and the new Libretto W100 that shows just how far we’ve come in 25 years.

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6 replies on “Toshiba introduces the T1100 notebook… in 1985”

  1. the dual floppy was probably as much about being able to run a program and read files at the same time as there is no HDD in that thing. Love the 14.4k modem and the $4000 price tho 😉

  2. I grew up as the child of a salesperson at a computer store. I laughed at the PCs and loved all of the Apple stuff. I thought these suitcase PCs were hilarious at the time, but this was one of the first the first portable released that really caught my eye. I spent a fair amount of time on it after hours. Unfortunately, I was much more comfortable issuing commands in BASIC than DOS.

    Toshiba’s quality used to be fantastic. To this day, I run a few Toshiba laptops from between 12 and 15 years old. All run like great. All run daily. None has ever pretended to have a problem. Still hours of battery life. All are too heavy for their size. Sometimes I drag one to a coffee shop just to help them keep their dignity in older age.

  3. I considered buying the T1100 while I was in school to replace by Tandy 100. I was drawn to the T1100’s competitor, the Zenith Z181 which boasted the first truly readible backlit LCD display. My Z181 came with dual 256k disk drives. A hard drive version was not introduced for another few months.

    Bronsky

    1. Ho. I had the Zenith Z183, which had the 10mb hard drive (later replaced with a 20mb.)

      That machine had the most amazing keyboard…

      1. I remember than when we were young we had no personal computers. Then my cousin got a 386 and I was like WOW!! World has changed so much.

        I still cant forget TD(Test Drive Dos version) the Stunts. I spent so much time playing those games.

  4. I remember those. I did not have one but wanted one. It would be neat to have some that looks like that but with newer technology inside; retro. 🙂

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