Expanding the Smallest Laptop of the 1990s
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- Опубліковано 25 гру 2023
- 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
diodemilliampere.bandcamp.com/
Adlib Tracker II
www.adlibtracker.net/index.php
Movies:
Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Until the End of the World (1991)
Images:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DE...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... - Наука та технологія
Okay, that tiny floppy disc going into a tiny card in a tiny computer is ADORABLE.
I agree!
@@JanusCycleBALLS!
@@achhcityshorts46466.1 inches
The click was so satisfying ASMR-ish, even
That thing seems like a marvel of engineering to me. Such a tiny mechanism!
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.
Yep, I have one to PCI card. But even more I want a PCMCIA card to PCI slot. Jank it up to 11.
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!
I made sure to get some nice close ups of the cracks on mine 😲
@@JanusCycle My goodness, yeah, that's a lot of cracking on both your Librettos :-/ The plastic parts on my 50CT (which I've had since 2000) are still in much better shape, maybe storing it in a zipped-up leather carrying case helped a bit. I do have another laptop (a cheaply made Maxdata) that's about the same age and its gray plastic has turned very brittle about 10 years ago.
Are the batteries still working on yours? I recently swapped out the LiIon cells ony mine, but it turns out the old ones still had about half their original capacity, I very much doubt the new cells will last 25 years...
Museums find such vintage plastics a pain to deal with in terms of preservation. If only there was a way to stabilise them somehow, short of having to remold all of them in a durable resin or something of that sort.
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.
I would love this. I've been looking but not found anything yet.
I think the slot on the Libretto is a 16-bit slot, not a 32-bit one.
The HDD card bonking the system IS the real HDD experience haha
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.
There would be some demand for these cases.
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.
Ultra portable computing is still really useful for travelling. I travel between a lot of places quite often, I dont really like the weight that comes with a large laptop. I currently use an iPad Air with the logitech keyboard case, which even then is a lot smaller (and lighter) than most modern laptops.
Haha that’s great, i’ve also been driving an iPad 10.5 inch jailbroken with a lenovo BKC700 keyboard. Not as small but still a wonderful little device with a compact footprint. Having to bring a dongle around is a little inconvenient but it’s still crazy how much power is packed into these little machines. :D
The UX is of course legendary. The OQOs are intruiging, always wanted to try one.
@@conturnplayscounturn6911 How did you manage to get the BKC700 keyboard working with the iPad Pro?
Your PCMCIA cards collection is impressive!
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
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.
Very nice collection. I hope you can source that keyboard part.
VGA in? Are you sure it's not a 9-pin serial port instead?
@@tom611 Your right, I had another look and it appears to be a serial port
I miss PCMCIA cards, and Johnny Mnemonic is a great film to show on it.
Your stuff needs to reach millions of followers, this is what the people need to crave.
Thanks! I just pleased there are some people interested in this stuff.
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!
Another great video! I believe the reason it freaked out when you installed the HDD card is too much power was drawn from the slots. Would explain why the external USB mouse stopped working. Just a theory
A very good theory. I think you might be correct there.
The sound is amazing.
Had a "Realmagic Hollywood Plus" decoder card back in the mid 90s. Cutting edge stuff. I'm not surprised that card is scorching.
i really enjoy your content dude😁
,also i appreciate for caption you make for your video, it's really help me who bad at listening xD love from Indonesia 🇮🇩
Thanks, I like knowing the captions are appreciated.
Gosh, I have so much nostalgia for PC Cards. They made older laptops viable for sooo much longer. That MPEG card and Sound Blaster are things I’ve never seen before though!
XP ran awfully on my P3, so I bet this will hardly manage it. Probably best to keep it as it is.
That’s one of my favourite AdLib tracks lately, thanks for showing it off 👍
XP would just be for the proof of install experience. I just want to know what it would be like.
@@JanusCycle haha fair enough. I don’t ever need to go through that again, but if you want to!
@@JanusCycle Perhaps WinFLP might be useful?
P3 and P2 both work rather well with w2k...
i ran XP on multiple P3s and it's absolutely fine. though on my P1, i personally run W2K with kernel extensions
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
These machines are absolutely incredible. Definitely a form factor I wish became commonplace.
What do you think about the GPD devices?
Used to daily drive an old hp compaq wayy after it’s time and i’ve always wondered what the slot on the side was for. Thanks for showcasing my first look into a pc card and all the cool things they can be used for.
Wonderful channel, will be subscribing for more.
P.S. Kudos to the tasteful selection of tracker music
I'm glad you enjoyed this, thanks!
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!
The thumbnail and title made me think it was an MJD video, but the video is also really good.
Then I'm in good company then :) thanks!
I love your videos ♥♥♥
Thanks!
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.
your videos have something special that makes them stand out from the others, very good video!
I really appreciate hearing that.
I would definitely like to see how Windows XP would run on one of these! It was a lot of fun seeing what different expansion PCMCIA cards there are, and I had no clue that there were that many. Keep up the great work on this channel.🙂
I have personally seen Windows XP run on a P166 before. it was kinda usable as long as you don't go online.
@@RealEpikCartfrenYT Maybe it's usable if you have lots of RAM. With the advertised bare minimum of 64 megs there's no free RAM left for programs so you pretty much need to go into swap. I believe this was an unofficial SP4 I was trying on my 166.
What a delightful video! You allowed me to travel back in time and get access to premium devices. Thank you!
You are very welcome :)
Just one more reason why I need a Toshiba Libretto. Awesome video! Never thought I'd ever see a DVD play on one of these things!
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.
Very cool :)
i was actualy searching for this machine so thanks for the video
Hey cool, I hope you enjoy it.
Such a lovely trip that was, Johnny Mnemonic, tracker music, 166MMX.
Once I saw an external videocard which connects via PCMCIA, now I saw everything
that song on the opl3 chip sounds like something daft punk would come up with and I love it!
I really enjoy these kinds of videos. Great work🎉
Great to hear that :)
Happy Holidays! Really enjoy your videos!
Thank you, Happy holiday season to you too!
The Libretto 100CT can be overclocked up to a 110CT. Mine has a 2,5" IDE to dual-CF Card Adapter and 2 8GB CF Cards.
The part when you tested soundblaster card was my favorite. Tracker music is so awesome
If I had a Libretto like that I'd most definitely stick Windows XP on it just for fun. I don't think it's gonna run well, but it sure will make for an interesting experience.
My attempts to get XP running on a Libretto were about as successful as Brexit...But IME Windows 2000 works like a dream on them! 😁
Now...If only it was still safe to connect a Win 2K machine up to _any_ form of network... 😉
What an amazing collection. Thank you for sharing!
You are welcome :)
I have a box of assorted PCMCIA cards, collected over the last 3 decades. Most I no longer use, except flash card adapters that make it easy to pull files off older laptops with no built-in networking. I keep all my cards in mint condition, taking special care of plugs, having seen so many of them damaged by excessive force. Those cards were most convenient to have with my Jornada 720. A PCMCIA on that baby was amazing to have. That is one computer I miss the most. If only they ever made a TFT model, or at least an aftermarket mod.
As for MPEG decoder cards - I spent something like $400, buying Creative Encore bundle with a Dxr2 decoder card. And I had a P2-266, which was sufficient at decoding in software. Turned out I could have way better quality, not relying on hardware, but it was so new. Was hard to tell what specs were needed for this revolutionary new thing called "DVD".
I am very curious about PCMCIA cards on Windows CE and getting drivers. I don't have a machine capable of doing that yet though.
Johnny Mnemonic! Great film choice, and some properly interesting cards - I used the Audigy loads as a mobile DAW playback device for band rehearsals.
I love how your video demo is Johnny Mnemonic!
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.
Nice overclock!
it does have a USB port with the bigger port replicator. it works well! Great video. I love these little machines!
What a fantastic blast back to the past! I loved the Pentium days.. I started in the XT years, I was very young but lucky enough to have a mom who worked in payroll so we had an IBM PC XT clone as our first home computer in the 80s. What a time to be alive!!
I had a 50CT that I used a lot in the late 90's, and I only really stopped using it when I got a VAIO PCG C1. At the time I was an IT Technician and I would use the 50CT to listen to MP3 and surf the web. I think I had a PC Card ethernet adaptor. I remember many PC Cards getting hot during use, there was a lot going on in a tiny space. I always liked the look of the 100CT but by the time I could afford the upgrade, the VAIO Picturebooks were the new hotness.
I just went down to my workshop, and the 50CT is still sitting on my archive shelf, along with the PCG C1 that replaced it and the C1VN that replaced that.
Two VAIO C1s! nice :)
3:41 I'm not even that old but my parents bought the DVD of Johnny Mnemonic movie for themselves when I was a child but they did not enjoy it. For me it was the very first cyberpunk themed movie I ever saw. That brings back good memories...
Nice! that must have been interesting to see as a kid.
@@JanusCycle Absolutely!
Old tech is so wonderfully nostalgic, it's almost painful to see their time pass.
Really enjoyed seeing the MPEG card - had no idea those were a thing!
Interesting video, even more interesting track!
An Iomega Click drive in working order after all these years. In PC Card format on top of that. And using the only disk you have. Well, this video is amazing through and through, but everyone will have their personal highlight, so there's mine. I came here for my love of Librettos and was certainly rewarded.
Libretto and Clik! just seem to go so well together :)
2:02 That sound is incredibly satisfying
as always your videos are superb . love it
Awesome, thanks!
@@JanusCycle uwu
this is my new favorite youtube channel.
Hey that's cool, thanks for letting me know.
Amazed by how much functionality they managed to squeeze into such a small form factor (PCMCIA).
With retro tech appreciation making something of a comeback within the last 10 or so years (especially in miniature compact form), this little thing would be a natural fit for a modern-ish update.
I used a Libretto 100CT as my personal digital assistant for a time in the 1990s. It was also my go to network jack tester with a 3Com 10/100 X-Jack LAN card. You might recall the X-Jack popped out of the edge and stowed away inside the card when not in use. I think they made a modem too. It also made a great MP3 player for the car, if you could keep track of the 1/8" to 2.5mm adapters. Thank goodness for Radio Shack...
Another masterpiece from JC!
i have that Libretto :) i still used it about 10 years ago with Sony Ericsson GPRS/WIFI Pcmcia card to free internet in no-secured networks :)
I don't know why, but tiny laptops and their accessories that are incredibly niche and underpowered bring a smile to my face.
a beautiful machine with great expandibility.. I reckon it would cost fortune back then, but you'd get a lot of use out of it
Incredible video. Best wishes from Panama 🇵🇦
Thank you :)
thanks for making this great video!
And thank you for watching!
Wow, that's some sweet ass cards you've got there!
Oh God I just love mini laptops!! This is a cute one 😍
I sold the Libretto back in the day, it was too expensive for most people. But I do remember all the PCMCIA cards needed to make it work properly.
I love your videos, I watch them in the evening to relax
That is really nice to hear, thank you
For those looking for that track that absolutely slaps, it's titled "Milinda" on the album "Psychic Pizza Connection"
I remember some of the last PC cards were for USB 3 and firewire
USB 3 on a mid-2k's laptop was a wild spectacle
I have a collection of Librettos, lovely things
This was my very first laptop ever! I got it second-hand in 2001 but still absolutely loved it! I overclocked the 166MHz Pentium CPU to 233MHz by soldering some points on the motherboard according to a diagram I found online.
Miss those days of computing and that Johnny menomic is a great movie
Johnny Mnemonic? Respect!!!🤘😁🤙
Thank you so much for this video. I love to see those librettos. Back in 2005 in my first job as an IT tech, a costumer showed me a libretto that i think it was the same as the one in the video. Back then was already obsolete but begged the costumer to sell me the laptop. She declined. 😢. Now i have two classic ThinkPads, a 760XL and monster 770X to remember good Win9x times 😊
Nice Thinkpads you have. There are some older smaller models that I really like. I'm glad you enjoyed the video.
4:50 I had one of the Creative DVD decoder PCI cards in 1999, and you had to loop through the VGA. So, this PC card one is quite clever in being able to send the decoded video back across the bus. Maybe that's what the "zoomed" bit refers to?
I had a triple stack of AGP graphics card (I think an ATI one), looping into a Voodoo 2 for 3D duties, looping into a DVD decoder for DVD duties, then off to the monitor. The DVD card SVHS output was then looped back to the Hauppage TV card for taking screenshots of DVDs (ripping a whole disc wasn't really an option as it took literal DAYS to re-encode movies as VCD on a 450MHz P2). Fun times!
Wow, great setup you had there.
The Zoomed Video port is indeed a protocol for sending back the decoded video. Regarding your old stack, I remember doing some transcoding on a Celeron 466 (or possibly III-700) and it definitely did not take days. My memories might also be tainted because I might've only transcoded part of a short movie instead of the whole thing.
Absolutely incredible. I always wanted one of those. I Actually used one of those Audigy 2 ZS cards with my gateway laptop from 2005 because i wanted 7.1 surround sound. It always got incredibly hot. Never had an issue with it though.
I had a Libretto 100CT for years, until in 2021, when the shelf it was on failed and it came tumbling to the floor.
This movie playing on this laptop looks like it was added in post :)
I really like your videos, even if the subject matter is somewhat mundane or not too interesting to me, I still like to watch and enjoy that nice crispy macro video and easy to listen, soothing voice as it calms me down when I'm looking for a little pause from youtube to the hustle and bustle of modern day living. What really peaks my interest is the hacking and novel uses of older cell phones, especially those that have physical qwerty keyboards. I dunno why, but they really shizzle my nizzle! Anyways, much love and thank you for making these videos ^_^
I really appreciate hearing that. Thank you.
Being able to play FM music natively on a Libretto makes it a great little portable music station. I had quite a lot of fun installing SBVGM on my 70CT, and running certain game soundtracks through it, especially the ones for Dune and KGB. I do at some point need to get the right kind of audio cable for it, though; those little 2.5mm jacks don't show up often enough that I have any adapters that'll fit them...
I still have my Libretto 110CT that I purchased way back when it first came out at the end of the 90s - I have the docking station too. I used to run dual boot with Redhat Linux. It was a perfect companion as a Unix consultant developer and, in those heady days, companies were less reticent about allowing people to connect their own equipment to the network. Its a great machine and still boots fine.
I'm really glad you still have yours and it's working!
I loved reading about these Libretto machines back in the 90s. I say read about because I was far too poor to own them, they just seemed impossibly small and yet fully featured.
PCMCIA/PC Card/whatever else they called it was a very cool standard, I did own a laptop with it in the 90s - some big chunky heavy thing - and being able to add functionality like a modem and network card relatively cheaply was quite neat. Later lots of laptops would have a WiFi card sticking out of the side too.
PC Card was huge, imagine Google or LG could create the mobile phone variant of this with Project Ara. Just installed an SD Card Reader in my Pixel 8 Ara
DVDs are 640x480 or 720x480, for the latter they're anamorphically streched to 854x480 or better depending on the playback software. Tho it really reveals the origins of DVDs as being intended for CRT displays with their line based output where such a horizontal stretch is super normal.
Until the End of the World is one of my favourite films! Good choice!
Wim Wenders :)
I have a bluetooth & USB card and I once saw a 2 port fire wire s400 one that sat flush with the port so it didn't have any sticky-outy bits
Very intresting video.
rare accessories. nice adventure. good stuff.
Cool video, thanks! ❤
Hey, you're welcome.
OPL Yamaha Sound is great, i love OPL 1, 2, 3
That DVD Decoder PC card... Hats off. I mean, how tiny is all that and they fit essentially a fully fledged DVD player's logic (and more as it passes the video to the OS as well), inclusive of 6ch audio processing and output. So it really is almost the whole DVD player box, only omitting the disc processing logic. Shame it doesn't enter a sleep mode when not in use (or perhaps that is a driver issue?)
I'd love to take the card apart and see inside. PCMCIA really don't like that though.
I really miss this form factor, at work I'd love a modern equivalent. Thanks for posting JC!
It does, GPD and a few others make pocket netbooks still.
I’ve seen many people nowadays drive tablets with keyboards...
though unlike most netbooks i’ve tried from the early 2010’s they’re not really quite as “lappable” and more suited to be on a table or desk but they’re still quite small in footprint
maybe an equivalent in spirituality then in succession
Look up GPD, they make some devices like this
your videos are so entertaining... geeky paradise...
The plastic case tho xD
Be warned, these older Librettos are known for the brittle.
If you cut XP down, disable search service, system restore tracking, disable themes, switch to classic mode etc - it can be quite usable - you could dual boot with 98SE and use the XP for experiments. Honestly most of XP chugging on old machines is just the inital search crawl and the restore DB building etc and general snappiness is a case of disabling all of the transparency/blend shadow UI stuff - as well as themes (lots of memory used there)
Windows 2000 is also a good option - driver stack is the same as XP and more often than not, XP only stuff is fine for 2000 too. It's slower to boot but can take up less memory overall.
Generally tweaking paging for the kernel in the registry might let you take advantage of the faster solid state storage and leave more physical RAM biased towards caching userspace stuff like dlls and application memory pools
I have been hearing good things about 2000. Always wanted to try it out.
12:15 I can imagine a DJ in 2024 walking into a club with this mf and blowing everyone's mind
Always liked these machines. I hav the 100 and a couple of 70 models. The 70's are not working. There was a few dock variations available as well that added lots more sockets. Especially for the 100 and 110. Nice video and camera work.
You have got another subscriber my friend.
cool :)
I dual-booted Windows 98 and Windows 2000 on my 110CT when I still had it. Upgraded that little beast to an 80GB spinning disk (many years before flash storage became affordable). I had a low-profile wifi card and a USB 2.0 card (with a dongle, not integrated ports like yours).
You had a nice setup for the time. And the same storage capacity as Johnny Mnemonic before he used the MemDoubler :)
@@JanusCycle I sold the whole setup on eBay a while ago to another collector. I also had an ASUS EEEPC 900, and a Viliv N5. The Libretto was always a favorite, though. It did a lot with a little. I even had the docking station with the PS2, cereal and parallel ports.
Johnny Mnenomic ❤love that movie
You have my ideal libretto setup. I've been wanting a 100ct for quite some time, along with all those cards. That zip click drive is amazing, as is the usb card.
Like i've always genuinely wanted this kind of setup.
I even had a cool idea for a PCMCIA to external PCI adapter, to pair with desktop PCI cards, maybe even a desktop PCI gpu. Like a voodoo card or something. (not PCIe)
To add an eGPU to a libretto.. I think that would have been so cool.
Edit: there's the Magma CB1F external pci expansion, but good luck finding one. :(
I would love an external PCI adapter. That would be amazing!
I have a libretto 50ct and a pcmcia cd-rom drive, and it works pretty well. The drive is close to the same size as the computer itself.