Expanding the Smallest Laptop of the 1990s

Expanding the Toshiba Libretto 100CT with different types of PCMCIA PC Cards. Including two disk formats of floppy disk drives, USB port enhancement, and even MPEG decoding.

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Music by Diode Milliampere

Adlib Tracker II

Movies:
Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Until the End of the World (1991)

Images:

[Jamato-sUn]

Okay, that tiny floppy disc going into a tiny card in a tiny computer is ADORABLE.

[Jackpkmn]

I loved all the goofy stuff you could get for PC Card and PCMCIA. But I especially love having cards that let me plug these laptop cards into my desktop computers by ISA or PCI. Takes jank to a whole new level when you get wifi running off an ISA card.

[silvestronsbitsandbytes]

I've been enamoured with the Libretto since reading about it in computer magazines in the late 90's, so seeing them still actively used today makes my heart sing. Unfortunately the plastics are just as brittle in the 100CT, so heed a pile of caution if you ever need to take the screen bezel off!

[fungo]

The 32 bit cardbus slot is basically a PCI slot.
You should try connecting a 3DFX Voodoo 2 card on this thing using some kind of PCI eGPU enclosure.

[borisborisov]

Your PCMCIA cards collection is impressive!

[digitaldion]

I wrote my PhD on a Libretto 50c! I still own the little gem! These days I use an iPad mini 6 with a bluetooth keyboard. I still love ultra portable computing! Thanks so much for the awesome video! By the way, at one point I also owned the Sony UX 180, and an OQO.

[isaiasprestes]

9:03 This sound teleported my mind straight to a quasi-random 1990s day of my life.
The sound experience of your videos are amazing! It's time-travelling!

[jakeparkinson]

We need people to scan the shell of old computers like this, a point cloud so we can use such as a reference for vertices in a 3d model. Then such can be fed to a 3d printer, and then we can have shell replacements for old machines. Look up at what a point cloud is, then this comment makes more sense.

[WarlordEnthusiast]

I have two of these laptops, a 50CT and a 100CT, the 50CT belonged to my father who used it as a demo unit when he was a salesman in the 2000's. He said they were impractical to actually use and wayyy too expensive, but executives loved them because they were cutting edge and their compactness was universally impressive. They were expensive toys for showing off but so incredibly cool to me as a kid.
The 100CT was a gift from one of those executives after I swapped out all their old hardware in one of their offices almost 2 decades after he had bought a 100CT from my dad, apparently he still remembered my dad and me visiting their offices back then.

The keyboard is broken on the 100CT unfortunately and I'm still hunting for a replacement to get it working. The 50CT has a strange issue with the font scale, its almost impossible to read any text because its so squashed.

Along with the laptops, I have a "case logic" bag that was bundled with the 100CT along with 3 floppy drive modules, a 56k modem card and a 10mbps ethernet card. I also have a docking station for the 100CT called the "IO Adapter" that has a PS/2 port for a mouse, a printer connector, a VGA out for connecting a second screen I believe and a VGA in which I'm not entirely sure of its purpose.

[fremenondesand]

I miss PCMCIA cards, and Johnny Mnemonic is a great film to show on it.

[SweetSweetCandyBoyz]

Your stuff needs to reach millions of followers, this is what the people need to crave.

[MarcosCodas]

The HDD card bonking the system IS the real HDD experience haha

[nanomachines]

That's why I love Windows and PC. Like stuff is almost 3 decades old and it still just works with drivers auto installing and everything..on Linux you'd spend weeks writing a code from the scratch just to get basic functionality.

[fabtrainspottingandmore]

It's impressive to think, that such a small device back then struggeled to playback 480p Videos but nowadays almost every Phone can Playback 2160p 4K Videos without any problems

[Megabob]

Man I still remember my first laptop it was an old gateway and I remember getting a Wi-Fi PC card for it. Good times man

[arpeas_jds]

As soon as you brought up DVDs I thought about that Margi card, and there it is! Such cool stuff, hardware acceleration. In this form factor especially!

[marvinochieng]

I click Janus' videos and instantly i am teleported back to 1998 when my dad used to fiddle with similalr hardware and i just miss those moments more. Keep up the good work sir.

[ResidentTVC]

I have a Libretto 100CT overclocked to 233mhz with almost all accessories and in almost perfect condition. Absolutely love this piece of 90's tech.

[HandheldComputing]

So many crazy PC card options to choose from! Love the Libretto UMPCs, so well made!

[svRx]

it does have a USB port with the bigger port replicator. it works well! Great video. I love these little machines!