Toshiba T1100 — why a laptop without a hard drive was named an IEEE milestone of electronic engineering?

A laptop, which was intended “for mobile professionals”, with up to 8 hours of battery life, with an $1899 price… in 1985. How was it possible? This is a hero of this story, Toshiba T1100 Plus:

Let’s check how it works.

Specs

In the 80s, computers already were an important part of everyday life, and it was obviously nice to have a portable computer that you can take with you, with all the files, documents and personal data. Well, at that time mobile computers were not ‘portable’ but ‘luggable’, and the reason was obvious, the first portable computer, the Osborne I, was looking something like this:

Source © https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1

This machine, released in 1981, was, by the way, the first commercially successful mobile computer, but of course, in reality, with a 24.5 lb (11.1 kg) weight it was far from portable. But the progress was going further, and already in 1985 Toshiba engineers made the laptop, which could be easily placed in the bag. How did they do that? Several components were crucial for this:

• Display. Heavy and bulky CRT was replaced by a thin and light LCD. These displays had a slow refresh rate and low contrast, but for working with documents it was good enough.
• Screen backlight. Which backlight? Toshiba T1100’s LCD had no backlight at all — the user had to care for enough ambient light. This solution may sound weird nowadays, but in the 80s and 90s, it was pretty common for wristwatches, Psion or Palm PDAs. And even today lots of people enjoy reading books from eInk screens, so the passive screen is actually not a too bad idea.
• Hard disk drive. What kind of disk drive? There was no disk drive at all in Toshiba T1100. This solution may sound weird nowadays (did I already write it?) but at the MS-DOS time, it was common to have a PC with one or two floppy drives. Hard disk drives were bulky and expensive, and the software size was also small enough to run from a floppy drive. My Windows folder size is about 20 GB nowadays, but the MS-DOS minimum…