LinuxPlanet: .comment: A Two-Pound UNIX Workstation On the Cheap

“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 640×480. Those were marketed outside Japan. In 1998,
the 100CT was unveiled with a P-166, a maximum of 64 megs of
memory, and an 800×480 (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