The T1100 was the first laptop released in the market by Toshiba in 1985 becoming a dominant force in the computing industry. It was IBM compatible and priced at $1899 at the time. The laptop weighed a whopping 4.1 kilograms with a 4.77 MHz processor and 256KB of Ram. Promotional material at the time coined the laptop as compact, small and light enough to fit into a briefcase. Compared to the  MacBook air today with a weight of 1kg, we beg to differ.

Unlike today’s laptop that features a hard drive, everything on the T1100 was handled by floppy disks that were either internal or external. A switch on the back of the laptop helped you decide which floppy to use. The reflective LCD was 640 by 200 pixels and could only display 25 lines of 80 characters. Compared to the display on the smallest MacBook Air which is 11 inch, the T1100 had a 10.2 inch display that was black and white.

As for connectivity, no wireless options were available. USB ports were unheard of and users had to output from either an external display with an RGB, a composite that didn’t allow for dual-displays or an RS2320. The external disc drive used a 37-pin connector while the printer used a 25-pin connector.

Mr. Atsutoshi Nishida, the now president of Toshiba, was head of the Toshiba project at the time. He said that everyone was skeptical on whether the laptop would make any sales and its manufacture had to go through so many hurdles. He never gave up though and got an approval after promising to sell 10,000 of the machines within an year. He had a dream that one day laptops would be of a smaller size in the years to come which did come to pass.
[source: www.thenextweb.com]