Toshiba Libretto

» see toshiba.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 17 april 1996 Toshiba shipped a Windows machine that weighed 840 grams and measured 210 by 115 millimeters, which is roughly a hardback book. Inside was an AMD 486 running at 75 MHz with 8 MB of memory and a 270 MB disk, behind a 6.1 inch screen. It was the smallest commercially available Windows PC in the world and it stayed the reference point for that claim for years.

It was sold in Japan and nowhere else. That was true of most of the line across its whole life, and it is the reason the Libretto is remembered differently depending on which country you were in. Japan got a continuous product with insurance company variants and NTT DoCoMo rebadges. The rest of us got two or three models and a lot of photographs.

In Turkey this was never a purchase, it was a specification you read about. A subnotebook at import prices in 1997 cost more than a desktop that would run anything, and the desktop is what people in my position bought. i have owned a lot of machines since 1998 and none of them were ever the small expensive one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the machine actually was ~

Not a handheld and not a laptop. Toshiba built a real x86 PC with a real hard disk and a keyboard you could just about touch type on, then refused to make it any bigger. The famous ones in the west were the 100CT and 110CT of 1997 and 1998, Pentium MMX machines with 6.1 inch screens, a pointing nub on the lid corner rather than the keyboard, and a docking connector for when it had to behave like a desktop.

The compromises were real. Battery life was short, the screens were small enough to be a genuine problem in Windows, and there was no optical drive without hanging something off the side. People bought them anyway, mostly people who traveled constantly and had decided that carrying weight was the expensive part.

~ the idea came back cheaper ~

Toshiba pulled the Libretto out of Europe and the US in 1999 and kept it alive in Japan until 2002, by which point the L series had grown a 10 inch widescreen and moved to a Transmeta Crusoe. Then the line stopped for three years, came back once in 2005 as the U100, and went quiet again.

While it was away, Asus shipped the Eee PC in 2007 and the netbook happened. The Libretto's whole argument, a small cheap x86 machine you carry everywhere, turned into a category selling at three hundred dollars. Toshiba had been first to the idea by eleven years and was priced out of its own invention. The netbook then died too, in the two years after the iPad, so the category managed to be killed twice.

~ the last one ~

The W100 arrived in august 2010 for the twenty fifth anniversary of Toshiba laptops. Two 7 inch touchscreens on a hinge, no physical keyboard at all, 819 grams, 1,099 dollars, and a battery good for about two hours. It was announced as a limited run and it behaved like one, selling out at Amazon within weeks and never being restocked.

Reviewers were kind about the ambition and honest about the machine. It was the same instinct that produced the Libretto 20 in 1996, arriving at a moment when the industry had already decided the answer was one screen with no keyboard. Nothing carried the name afterward. The line just stopped in 2010 with a device that most people who wanted one could not buy.

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