A (0:02)

In the early 1980s, portable computers were either one of two big and functional or small and basic. And while there were successes within each category, you can hardly identify them as today's modern laptops. This changes in 1985 when the Japanese company Toshiba released a groundbreaking laptop PC that brings it all together for the first time in today's video. Let us look back at the first commercially successful laptop PC, the Toshiba T1100 and its successors. So in the first of the two categories we had these battery powered handheld computers called palmtops. These were extremely portable and ran on AA batteries. Notable examples of these small palmtops include the Epson HX20, released in July 1982 and marketed by Epson as the first handheld computer when it arrived on US shores. BusinessWeek hailed the little computer and its 50 hour battery life as heralding the fourth revolution in personal computing. It sold a quarter million units. Another palm top was the TRS 80 Model 100. The Model 100, do not confuse it with the Model 1, was a relatively small device produced by Kyocera and powered by four AA batteries. Tandy Corporation licensed it and sold it exclusively in their Radio Shack stores for about $800, or about $2,700 today, a pretty good price. Back then it was well reviewed by journalists who used it as a portable text editor, so these were fairly popular. But size and power issues placed heavy limitations on their use and real business people refused to adopt them unless they were somewhat compatible with the IBM PC ecosystem. So they can run applications like Lotus 1, 2, 3, and then on the other end of the spectrum, the luggables. No, not lunchables. These computers were fairly large and heavy, about 12 kg or so, and since they lacked the battery they needed to be connected to a wall plug. But they were portable in the sense that you can unplug it and stick it underneath a plane seat. The first commercially successful luggable was the Osborne one, released in 1981 by the Osborne Computer Corporation. Running an early microcomputer operating system called CP M 2.2, it sold quite well, generating sales of 10,000 units a month. At its peak, however, the Osborne one looks nothing like the laptops of today. It resembles more a chonk field radio than a computer. It didn't have that clam shell form factor that was pioneered by the Grid Compass, which some credit as the first clamshell laptop. Developed for NASA and costing $8,000 or about $27,000 today, the Compass was nowhere near a mass market device. It also ran its own custom operating system and software. The big breakout came a bit later in 1983 with the Compaq Portable, the first luggable to be perfectly compatible with the IBM PC ecosystem. The portables sold like gangbusters and launched Compaq to dominance. So you had these two palm tops and luggables, good in their own way, but neither perfect. Why not create something with the best of both? A PC compatible clamshell laptop, small and portable with a battery. Who would be the one to make it? Tetsuya Mizuguchi first joined Toshiba in 1963. A tall, big boned man with a wrestler's frame, Mizuguchi proved himself to be a natural leader in Toshiba's computer division. In 1977, Mizuguchi reads a translated version of Alan Kay's famous screed personal Dynamic Media. K is a legendary computer scientist who broke new ground in user interfaces for the computer whilst at Xerox's PARC R and D lab. In that paper, K introduces a product concept that he called the Dynabook, a computer with the power and portability to help everyone learn. The idea inspires Mizuguchi to produce an early PC prototype called the T400, running the basic language and an Intel 8bit CPU. Unfortunately, it remained a prototype with only a few ever being made. In 1981, Toshiba produces a line of desktop PCs called the Passopia. The name comes from a combination of Personal and Utopia. Powered by a Zilog Z80 CPU, the Passopia is shipped with a basic interpreter, 64K of RAM and a liquid crystal display capable of showing 8 lines of 40 characters each. Unfortunately, the Passopia one arrived at the Japanese market too late to dislodge NEC's PC8001 and PC98 operating system, which had debuted a few years earlier. PC98 would go on to dominate Japan's PC industry for over a decade. A year later, Toshiba tried to sell the Passopia line of computers in the United States, marketing it as the Toshiba T200. Unfortunately, that computer's incompatibility with IBM's PC ecosystem meant that it was dead on arrival. Toshiba invests substantial resources into a follow up called the Passopia 7, a machine oriented more to enthusiasts. Released in 1983, it also fails to make a significant mark. Whoever first came up with the idea for the Toshiba T1100 is rather murky. Here is the best timeline that I can put together based on multiple sources. After two Failures in a row. Toshiba's management prepares to leave the PC space entirely. However, the company's head of Electronic Equipment division in the International Business department, Keiichi Hataya, convinces his bosses to stay as an original equipment manufacturer, or oem. Being an OEM means that Toshiba produces the hardware for another company. Kind of like how kyocera produced a TRS 80 model 100 device for Tandy to sell in their Radio Shack stores. So Hayata travels to the United States to search for potential OEM clients. No clients emerge, but during his travels, he writes a report to his bosses about producing a small IBM compatible computer that can fold up and sit on a desk. This need is reinforced by a second U.S. trip. In 1983, three Toshiba executives go to Los Angeles to work with the consulting firm McKinsey on a project called Brighter Blue. The project yielded a new promising market position. Our plan was for a clamshell type transportable PC with an LED screen and IBM compatibility. The issue was that Toshiba's management refused to spare any more resources for another Toshiba branded PC. This made things tricky for Mizuguchi and his boss, the newly appointed general manager of the computer business division, Masaichi Koga. After having two requests for money and engineers rejected by Toshiba leadership, they secretly diverted resources from various military projects to fund the task force to build it. This could have gotten them all fired. But the factory in which they were working was in Ome, Japan, geographically distant from the Toshiba headquarters. There's a phrase in Chinese that comes to mind here. Tian gao huang diyuan. Heaven is high and the emperor is far away. And despite the losses in PCs, Toshiba's larger computer division was making good money from selling office minicomputers and optical character recognition software for the Japanese language. Those profits gave the division more leeway. The task force was led by Ginzo Yamazaki and the prototype was completed in August 1984. It had a CMOS Intel ADC88 chip built in, disk drive and monochrome LCD screen about 640x400 pixels large. You can adjust the angle of the screen, even folding it all the way back. The whole thing weighed about 4.1kg and was about 31.1cm by 6.6cm by 30.5cm large. So about four to five magazines stacked on top of each other. You can Also imagine a 16 inch MacBook Pro, but with twice the thickness. The project gets a major boost forward with the entry of Atsutoshi Nishida Nishida was then Toshiba's European PC sales manager. He has an interesting story. Falling in love with an Iranian woman during university and following her to Iran where he joined a Toshiba affiliate. He worked his way up from there. At this time, Nishida's product portfolio was made up of just PC peripherals and printers. He occasionally goes to Tokyo to see new products at the OME factory. And it is during one of those meetings that he sees a prototype of the laptop. He immediately recognizes its potential for his sales portfolio and asks the brass to produce it, saying, make me seven prototypes that I can show around Europe and I will commit to sell 10,000 units the first year. HQ relents and allows the seven prototypes to be made. But Nishida can only get the money for the project by diverting it from his larger international sales and marketing budget. He takes the seven prototypes to IBM dealers in Europe with the sales pitch desktop from IBM and laptop from Toshiba. These are complementary products and there is no competition between them. In fact, now you have the opportunity of selling two computers to the same customer. There was one more challenge for him. In order to make the T1100 as small as it was, they had to adopt a smaller sized floppy disk, 3.5 inches. The problem was that the software industry had standardized around a larger 5.25-inch floppy disk. And without software like Lotus 123, a computer would be dead on arrival. So Nishida goes to Lotus European offices in London to ask them to offer 3.5 inch floppies. He was immediately rejected. Undeterred, he goes back three more times. On the fourth time, Nishida recalls in a 2005 interview with Amy Bennett. By my fourth visit, he was fed up with my persistence and he told me he would talk to an engineer as a personal favorite, not anything official. I next visited Lotus in my personal capacity and the man migrated Lotus 123 to 3.5 inch floppy disks. It worked perfectly. Nishida then goes to the other big software vendor of the day, Ashton Tate, which produced a database software called Debase, a competitor to Lotus. Ashton Tate quickly agreed once they heard that their rival was doing it. Meanwhile, the Toshiba team was working hard to test the hundreds of Ms. DOS software packages on the laptop. Getting the popular Microsoft flight simulator program to work was said to have been particularly tricky. Toshiba first presented the T11 laptop in Germany at the Microcomputer Trade Fair in January 1985. It hit the German market a few months later, and right off the Bat the laptop made a splash with customers and critics. Reviewers noted its thinness, good specs, and that it ran the Ms. DOS operating system. Wow, just like desktop. IBM. I've seen Flight Simulator running on the LCD and on a monitor. And hundreds of other programs also are claimed to run, including Lotus 123. The price starts at under $3,000. What chance can IBM have if it reaches the market later and more expensively? Other reviewers recognized the incredible social potential that a portable IBM compatible laptop held for working life. An Australian columnist named Gareth Powell noted in August 1985, the Toshiba T1100 is revolutionary in a quiet way. Almost every single component it contains is available in one form or another in computers which have been on the market for some time. It is the way these components have been assembled and the way in which the machine will be used which makes it revolutionary. Powell then explains that the T1100's portability is so game changing because now it is possible for business executives to take their work home with them. It spares them from staying at the office late. The laptop hit American shores in November 1985 with an exhibition at the big Comdex trade show. It was made available for sale in early 1986. Nishida spent 1985 promoting the T1100 to various companies in Europe. And by year then Nishida missed his promised 10,000 unit sales by just 230 units. But he sold those soon afterwards. The T1100's success brought new competitors into the market. In early 1986, Compaq released the Compaq Portable 2. They famously wanted to do their own laptop but would not do so until 1988. So the portable II remained more of a high end luggable workstation that didn't compete in the same space. But Zenith, the former consumer electronics company, did go hard with their Z181, a PC compatible clamshell laptop that boasted an adjustable backlit LCD screen. You uniquely enough, it glowed blue. IBM also released their own laptop PC, the convertible. It also had the smaller 3.5-inch floppy drive and an internal battery. But despite being a real deal IBM system, the Convertible's high price and non backlit panel made it a tough sell. This first laptop failed to make a major impact on the market. To keep up with Zenith, IBM and others, Toshiba quickly expanded their product lineup. In 1986 there was the T1100, which featured a small CPU speed bump. It sold extremely well. At the start, Toshiba struggled to keep up with demand with backlog stretching up to six months long and reviewers liked it. Though I did read an amusing complaint letter pointing out that that the function keys on the keyboard were set backwards on two rows snaking from top right to bottom left. That is indeed demented. Toshiba also added high and middle tier models Many customers found the T1100's LCD screen hard to read, leading to a few reviewers recommending the blue screen Z181. So also in 1986, Tabitha Toshiba introduced the high end T3100. It was compatible with IBM's new PC at computer and changed the screen from an LCD to a yellowish gas plasma screen. It also had a 10 megabyte hard disk drive, a first for a laptop. The screen was indeed far more readable in light, but its power hungry nature meant that the computer had to be plugged into the wall and at 6.8kg or 15lbs it cannot go far anyway. Toshiba also brought out a mid tier T2100 which never reached the United States but did well in Europe and Australia. In late 1987, Toshiba then released the T1000, which cemented the company's place in laptop history. No Terminator puns will follow. The story behind this one is a bit interesting. In April 1987 the US tariffed certain Japanese imports for allegedly violating a US Japan Semiconductor Agreement. Two of the tariffed items were 16 bit desktops and laptops with LCD screens capable of handling 16 bits. This effectively doubled the price of the T1100, making it unviable in the market. So Toshiba cleverly exploited a loophole by putting a 4.77 MHz Intel ADC88 CPU into the T1000, an interesting choice because while the chip was 16 bit, it communicated through an older 8 bit bus, exempting the laptop from the tariff. What people most noticed about this computer, however, was its size and functionality. At just 2.9 kg and 12 x 11 x 2 inches large, about the size of a large textbook, the Toshiba T1000 was the smallest Ms. DOS laptop yet released. Moreover, it had a panoply of connectors, ports and drives. An internal nickel cadmium battery provided about five hours of working life. And best of all, it was very cheap. Priced at about $1,200 or $3,300 today, one can justifiably call it the MacBook Air of its day. It wasn't perfect. People noted the trade offs that had to be made for portability. But reviewers and enthusiasts could not believe that Toshiba was able to stuff so much into it. Toshiba marketed it as a second device to business people, but you could use it as your primary, and it sold very well. Though precise sales numbers are not publicly available, a reviewer at Byte magazine said it was the first laptop that he's seen to be better for writing than the old Tandy Model 100. Its users still remember it fondly to this day. Many Years later, in 2006, the editors of PC World magazine declared it the 17th best PC of all time, recognizing its groundbreaking status. Sales of the T1000 and its variants like the SE helped Toshiba capture 40% of the US and Europe laptop markets in 1987, and in 1988, they retained 38% and 21% market share despite a new wave of competition. Hasta la vista, baby. After shipping the T1100, Mizoguchi and his team go back to Alan Kay's vision of the Dynabook. Inspired by their success and the introduction of new display technologies, the team sets out to make an actual Dynabook. Mizoguchi envisioned having a true portable that can go to where humans are, rather than the other way around. This meant pushing the boundaries once more. Mizuguchi envisioned his Dynabook to be as large as an A4 file, be just 40mm thick, weigh under 3kg, and have a backlit LCD, an instant start button like the IBM PC convertible, and a hard disk drive. And ah yes, a price tag of under 200,000 yen. A radical price cut. The development process was grueling. A now famous anecdote recounted the engineers producing a prototype that was only 50 mm thickness, so about 10 mm short of goal. They nevertheless argued that they had hit their limits. So the development manager supposedly took that prototype and immersed it in a bucket of water. Upon seeing bubbles rising to the surface, he said that there was still space left to cut. So they got it down to 44mm. In June 6, 1989, Mizuguchi and Toshiba announced the Dynabook J3100 at the Shinjuku Sentry Hyatt. And again people marveled at how the laptop pushed the envelope in terms of size, weight and features. After the 1989 presentation, Mizuguchi got in touch with his idol and Kei came to Japan to give a brief talk and even signed eight of the DynaBook laptops. For Mizuguchi, it was a dream come true. Though I would be bereft if I did not also mention that. Kei later said that he did not consider the Toshiba Dynabook a real Dynabook because it ran Ms. Dos HA. Toshiba remained a leader in the industry throughout the 1990s by pushing the envelope on battery life, size and weight and build quality. In 1997 they sold their 10 millionth unit, but in the 2000s they lost ground to HP and Dell in the lower end consumer range, not meeting the price point fast and aggressively enough. And in the corporate space they ceded ground to Dell and IBM Lenovo, which did a better job of entering the enterprise. In 2018, Toshiba began selling its stake in its Dynabook division to Sharp Foxconn, completing their exit from the industry in August 2020. Nevertheless, the commercial success of the T1100, T1000 and its successors set the tone for the laptop as we know it today. It proved to all that this form factor was worth pursuing and they pushed the limits on its thinness, function and portability. They can be proud of their impact in electronics history. Alright everyone, that's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the Channel, Sign up for the Patreon and I'll see you guys next time.