The world's THINNEST laptop (in 2001)

Laptops were gaining popularity in the early 2000s due to increasing selection and falling prices. In the thin-and-light category, Toshiba pulled out all the stops and produced a machine so portable that it rivals even today's laptops.

Sources:
"The Laptop Shell Game," Popular Mechanics, October 2002.
"The Notebook Buyer's Guide," Maximum PC, July 2005.
"An Intel-Approved Desktop to Go," PC Magazine, August 5, 2003.
"Toshiba Portege 2000," PC Magazine, April 9, 2002.

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[theodomon]

Little tip for Toshiba drivers that aren't available on their website anymore: trying the link on the Wayback Machine usually works. It might work with other brands as well.

[MonkDarkfyre]

I worked at Toshiba when this came out. With the employee discount it was only $1, 200 (normally about $2K). Also bought the extra battery and external CD drive. Handy, little device that I used a lot and still own.

[SubashishB]

My first laptop was a Toshiba. It makes me sad that they are out of the PC game. I'd have loved to buy another Toshiba if they kept making them like before.

[ernstoud]

I was a product manager at Toshiba Benelux around 1990. Amazing that then they had the largest market share and they are gone now. First notebook with 286, first with 386, first with 486, first with TFT color, first with pcmcia etc. etc.

[bryans]

I was sorry to see Toshiba go out of business. I had a Satellite, vintage 1999, that served me well as a traveling trainer for a couple of years.

[p]

I bought a 13 inch Toshiba laptop in early 2002, which had a P3. It was not the fastest but worked well. The part that annoyed me was when I tried to swap the CD drive for a CD burner and it would not work, yet when I put that same CD burner in an older P2 gateway computer it worked fine; only to find out from Toshiba that they locked the drive upgrades to sell more expensive Toshiba Laptops.

[carlost]

The way these old laptops look brings me great nostalgia.

[oOZellzimaOo]

I had one of these at a repairshop I worked at back in 2017. I was stunned when I found out this came out in 2001!
I installed a super light version of XP on it with a Windows 7 skin. I then played back a few episodes of Star Trek TNG to test out if it could handle video playback. 240p videos where its limit, but it could play videos!

[Canada]

Oh man, I remember these. We had a ton of them, my users (especially the execs) loved the size.

[georgeh]

How were you able to pull a 2001 laptop out of an envelope? That was not possible until Macworld 2008!

[MARC]

Nice laptop! I sold a lot of Toshiba laptops back in the early 2000's. They were pretty good. Having WiFi and an SD card slot was pretty futuristic back in 2001 - both were fairly new.

[OldMan_PJ]

There was a 2nd panel on the back next to the LAN port that has the RJ-11 port.

[hum-bay]

Absolutely! Business people LOVED those Protogés, and Toshiba was a quality manufacturer at the time.

[mael]

What a beautiful piece of computer history !!! Along the same genre, you MUST test the Sony VAIO PCG-505. It's an amazing machine and I'm sure you'll love it 😊 !

[BilisNegra]

4:53 ...Which certainly was not a common feature for the era (USB boot capability).

[ricahrdb]

Very impressive machine for the day. Toshiba invented the Ultrabook 10 years before Intel did. 👍

[redbeesrgd]

The only huge compromise I see here is the battery - the port selection and upgradability are way better than similarly thin and light modern laptops.

[Lukeno]

Toshiba had been building ultra-thin machines for a long time at this point - the Portege line from about the 3000 series onwards was less than an inch thick and IIRC also used an ultra-slim 2.5" drive to make it work.

[jik]

I still don't realise how thin it was compared to the other market laptops, but this is really impressive and daring to remove the optical drive at this time, with minimal ports. It reminds me today's thin laptop PCs.

[BoKB]

I own a Toshiba Tecra M5 from 2007 or 6 and i have to say it's pretty good for its time with ddr2 ram, sata hard disk and a core 2 duo. An excellent windows xp laptop in my experience