LinuxPlanet: .comment: A Two-Pound UNIX Workstation On the Cheap
Jan 02, 2002, 21:44 (10 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Dennis E. Powell)
"Sometimes it's important to do something just to see
if you can; indeed, the search for that lone datum is all that
separates it from the completely meaningless gesture.
It is because of my quest for dubious knowledge that I come to
you today from a keyboard so tiny that I could probably type faster
on it with chopsticks than with my fingers. But hey, it works.
The machine is a Toshiba Libretto 100CT. These were not, in my
estimation, worth the couple grand they cost when new, but are
pretty cool if you can find one on eBay for a few hundred bucks.
(Do remember, if you're gonna emptor on over to eBay, to caveat --
for instance, one of the two batteries I got with my Libretto was
in sorry shape, though the other one was fine.)
The Libretto series first appeared in Japan in the mid-90s with
AMD 486 chips; a couple years later they were upgraded to
Pentium-70 and P-120 chips (the 50CT and 70CT respectively) that
would hold only 32 megs of memory and had very bright screens that
topped out at 640x480. Those were marketed outside Japan. In 1998,
the 100CT was unveiled with a P-166, a maximum of 64 megs of
memory, and an 800x480 (yup!) screen. This in turn gave way to the
110CT, which was a 100CT with a P-233 chip. Just in terms of feel,
it seems to me as if the 100CT was the acme of the line -- there
are a lot of 110CTs with dead displays on the market, and
replacement screens are expensive."
Complete
Story
