A portable computer in a suitcase: Toshiba's 1982 T100 was nothing like any computer ever launched till then and it even came with a modem and a mechanical keyboard

Long before laptops became thin metal slabs you could slip into a backpack, portable computing meant something very different - in the early 1980s, portability was measured less by weight than by the simple fact that a machine could be moved from one desk to another at all.

The Toshiba T100, announced at CES 1982 in Las Vegas, was a revolutionary Japanese system that tried to bridge desktop power with emerging ideas about mobile computing, even if it arrived in a literal briefcase.

The T100 was different because it didn’t look or behave like the home computers that dominated the early microcomputer boom. Although Toshiba described the T100 as “typewriter-size,” a 1982 issue of InfoWorld observed that because its “LCD fits on top of the keyboard and CPU, which are combined into one unit” it was actually smaller than that.