Toshiba T1100 Plus

Toshiba's T1100 of 1985 was not the first laptop (the PC Magazine reviewer who adopted one retired a diskless NEC Starlet to do it), but it ran IBM PC software on batteries from a built-in floppy drive, and that reviewer found one "fairly serious drawback": the keyboard layout. The Plus is Toshiba's reply. It has a redrawn keyboard, a second drive, a processor with a 16-bit bus in place of the 80C88, and a case of almost the same size and weight. The magazine made it an Editor's Choice: "Toshiba fixed everything we found deficient in the original T1100, then made it twice as fast." Only Toshiba's own 286-based T3100 beat it on the magazine's benchmarks.

Toshiba's advertising chose a different rival. Its brochure sets the Plus against IBM's PC Convertible, which weighed 12.2 pounds, stopped at 512K and needed add-ons for the serial, parallel and monitor ports that the Toshiba carries on its back panel.

The dissent was about the screen. The first machines kept the T1100's panel, which one PC Magazine editor likened to "a bad photocopy underwater". In 1987 Toshiba fitted a supertwist panel, reported by c't from CeBIT as the news on the model. It still has no backlight: a U.S. Navy laboratory that tried five laptops that summer for use aboard submarines found the Toshiba's display the worst of them in anything short of excellent light.

There is no hard disk, and Toshiba's price list offers none. Software still came on 5.25-inch disks, so the list carries an external drive at $499 and a Floppy Link to a desktop's drive at $199.

introduced

1986

price at launch

$1,999 with 256KB

RAM

256KB, or 640KB with a card

drives

two 3.5-inch, 720K

weight

4.5kg

battery

NiCd, up to 8 hours

• Toshiba T1100 Plus PC Magazine, December 23, 1986, pages 122 and 123. The Editor's Choice, the changes from the T1100, the benchmarks and the screen.
• T1100 PLUS flyer Toshiba. The processor and its clock, memory, drives, ports, weight and battery.
• Portable Personal Computer Price List Toshiba America, June 16, 1986. The prices, the options, and no hard disk.
• T1100 PLUS brochure Toshiba America, 1986. The comparison with the IBM PC Convertible.
• T1100 PLUS maintenance manual Toshiba. The 80C86-2 and its two clock speeds.
• Laptops c't, May 1987, page 20. The supertwist screen.
• Laptop Computer Review, NSMRL Memo Report 87-4 U.S. Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, August 1987. The screen without a backlight.
• Toshiba T1100 Wikipedia. The original T1100, and 1986 for the Plus.