These sorts of machines are quite useful for field servicing equipment that doesn’t have it’s own display. It doesn’t take much processing power to display a settings list, or flash the firmware of a machine… and being small is a big advantage when you have to haul it around along with a bag of tools.
@@talkysassis Well, the first generations were aimed at business users; not technicians… but as machinery started to incorporate computer-derived control systems, technicians adapted the available portable computers to their work.
And it can run Windows or generic Linux, and therefore most of the software for servicing said equipment. And doesn't require a lot of dongles. Which is two things smartphones fail miserably to provide. That's why I'm a happy owner of GPD WIN.
@@darkwinter6028 That's interestinng and reminds me of what happened with mobile phones in Australia during their introduction in the 90s. Apparently mobile phones in Australia started out aimed at the business sector, which failed. It ended up being construction workers that became the primary clients as they had a real need to be contacted out on the road or in the middle of a construction site. Your average businessman was ususally stuck behind a desk at the time and ususally relied on a desk phone.
The funny thing is people in the West often like to say the Crusoe failed. But it didn't - in Japan it was highly successful and quite a substantial number of different manufacturers used it, and whilst Western Crusoe-based machines do tend to be rare and hard to find, you can still find tonnes of different options in Japan.
I had an the TC1000 HP/compaq tablet PC powered by a transmeta and have to say I was not very impressed by the power nor the battery life. Next year they offered one with a P3 mobile and was sprier without impacting much the battery life.
except it did fail, both financially and as product offerings, seeing as the curve of performance per watt wasn't any better than their competitors, but overall performance was worse
The VAIO silver and lilac colour scheme and high-quality finish was a breath of fresh air in a boring world of grey laptops - and it still looks striking today. I had one of the early magnesium VAIO 505 laptops and loved it to bits. Only my ThinkPad came close in the amount of work it did and abuse it took than that little machine.
There were reports the Transmeta CPU would benchmark up to 20% faster on the second run through as the CPU adapted it's x86 emulation. I tested this with Quake on my U1 and sure enough the frame rate improved the second time. I love the black U3, always wanted one.
Hi Janus! First of all you make great videos! On transmeta - i have c1mhp. Its a disaster, even back in a day. Very slowwww. However this chip let sony make some great designs. But for me the greatest ones are u50 and ux. First more premium and unique, second more practical
@@nurullahaksay funny, I was going to bring up how the first Rosetta was bad on the first run, but then I changed my second sentence to be more generic. I knew Rosetta 2 had a hybrid model involving JIT recompilation and then saving the results to memory, but I was unaware it did a silent first-pass. So that’s neat.
Funnily enough, the form factor isn't exactly dead. GPD made the Win Max and that gaming laptop looks quite similar to the PCG-U1. The Win 1 and Win 2 are a bit nicer to type on when held in both hands because they're smaller.
Yea i kind of want one since my smart phone has too many artificial limitations but these days i don't travel much so it would be a waste and i worry about windows lagging out all the time when i want to do something quickly on public transport.
@@belstar1128 to be honest it is really practical for me,(gpd win max,not gpd win 3)i use it as the main drive,for more than one year never felt like it is slow, Even if i don't use it that much, every time i do,i noticed the experience in a good way,Dont have to lift a heavy leptop, i just take it from the same place i put my phone to charge,most of the time i would even use the same charger, It can game nice, trough the battery dies fast this way, just for light tasks ,like video watching ,it has longer screen time than most phones, I guess the thing i use it the most is video watching, because of the screen stand The speakers are close to horrible
I worked for Transmeta from 2000 to 2002. It was an exciting time for sure. One thing the CEO pushed was that these systems weren't intended to be desktop replacements. Instead, they were meant as portable companions to a desktop PC, and never meant to be speed demons. Some of the hardware that used the processor was *very* cool though. I'm glad to have been employed there at the time.
That's funny, just recently I was watching a Cathode Ray Dude video about a similar Sony laptop with an integrated camcorder, also making use of the Crusoe CPU. The funny thing is, despite the whole point of that laptop being the camcorder functionality, the CPU was too weak to actually handle video encode which held it back quite a bit. Interesting to see this one also using it.
I bought a U3 when I was in high school, it cost me most of my savings. I used it for a few months, but ended up selling it because it wasn't fast enough for what I wanted to do. Got my money back when I sold it and was happy to have experienced that little machine's uniqueness.
You mentioned how hard those software and driver disks are to find, I really hope you imaged those you have there and uploaded them to the Internet archive
I owned a PCG-U3 back in the day. This series was something else entirely. Exotic, extremely cute, with a crazy good display. I miss the times when such creativity was allowed. Thank you for this review which took me back !
Yes those were great times for micro laptops. I remember Casio Fiva also using similar type low-power CPUs. But my favourite will always be Fujitsu mini laptops, they don’t have that sticky rubber coatings or the crack screen like Sony laptops after prolonged storage.
That CPU has some sorcery built into it, the more you run the same stuff the more it adapts and gets better at it, all while consuming much less power since it has less transistors. Having grown up only seeing Intel and AMD it is very interesting to me seeing other x86 CPUs like the Cyrix, Transmeta and VIA. I suspect the same would be true for younger people and graphic card manufacturers.
I will say having worked on Cyrix machines it had potential to be right on par with AMD in the 90's, but VIA never stood a chance on anything but really low power draw, as their chips both CPU, and IGPU were really slow with bad driver support, and not even a low resource Linux distro like Puppy could help them, as I owned a few VIA C7 based motherboards I put into service with my church in he mid 00's, and some Everex VIA C7 based laptops I bought for nieces, and nephews as gifts.
@@Voidsworn Trust me, I'm well aware of that, and read my comment again, as I never said VIA was based on Cyrix, just that Cyrix had potential, and that VIA was over promised hot garbage, with their only advantage being power draw.
This is what I miss the most from the late 90s/early 00s... Originality. I imagine having a desing like that, with a modern hardware, that would be dope
You'd appreciate a thumbs up would you? Well your down right getting one. This channel is quickly becoming my favourite for retro tech up there with LGR and Techmoan.
oh my, what memories! I had a U1 when I used to travel to Japan often for work between 2001-2011. I bought a U1, and then later a U50 and later still a UX50 all when they were new during my years working over there. As much as I loved them for their beyond cool gadget factor, the practicalities of actually using them always eventually came to the fore, and I'd move back to using a more normal laptop. I remember sitting in an office using the U1 to write my reports to my boss. My colleagues would take great pleasure on teasing me over just how tiny my little machine was (ahem).... I remember a colleague sending me an email where he had purposely set the font size as large as he could. When I opened it on the U1, even just a single letter would fill the screen. Everyone thought this was pretty hilarious, and indeed it was :-) I gave soooo much money to Sony (and to Yodobashi Camera) during my years in Japan. Great memories (lighter wallet). Fantastic video, thank you for the memories! I don't have the U1 anymore, I think I sold it to a friend back when it was still quite new. The U50 and UX50 I think I still have somewhere though. No idea if they still work, but I should try!
The western world never understood how far ahead they were for their time unfortunately, very few bleeding edge Japanese electronics actually got exported here
Japan bubble era. Since 2000's they were slowly overtook by Korean counterpart and then American based company. Today, china is beating Japan with robot vacuum tech and smartphone
I remember when these Sub notebooks came out. I wanted one SO BAD! The Toshiba Libretto and Sony Vaio P series were so cool! I loved anything with a tiny color LCD and full keyboard like the the LG Phenom which ran win CE. I ended up scoring a like new HP Omnibook 800 Subnotebook and a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 tablet pc off ebay in the early 2000's that I still have in my collection.
I am certainly glad there's companies out there that still try and make these things like GPD the packet three has been awesome brings back memories of the various miniature devices I saw along the way that I could never afford.
The Transmeta Crusoe chips. I remember the hype for them before they were released. I was working as a service supervisor & later service manager of a laptop repair depo in the 2000's and I remember talking to several of our corporate clients about the Transmeta chips. The low power & battery life claims had them interested, especially for companies that a very mobile work force like sales reps as one example but the disappointing performance results quelled much of that interest. IMO the best thing that Transmeta brought to the table is it forced Intel and to a lesser degree AMD to focus more on power saving features in their mobile CPUs. The Pentium 4's power issues also helped this along greatly! It also didn't hurt Transmeta that a number of laptop OEMs in the late 90s and early 2000s had tried to stuff a desktop CPU into a few models of their laptops, usually with less than stellar results. I can still remember the Toshiba Satellite 5005 or 5105 that had a desktop P3 1.13 ghz CPU in it. Sure the laptop was very fast for it's time, but the battery life on it was almost non-existent. The machine ran really hot and had a noisy fan. And if the heatsink wasn't properly cleaned often (which most home users didn't do!) the machine would overheat and either tank performance or shut off entirely. The issue was so bad that I think Toshiba had to extend the warranty on that model for an extra 6-18 months due to how often that happened. That's just one example but there were several others back then. The introduction of the Pentium M really sealed the fate of Transmeta when laptops with those chips were released in 2003. A Pentium M based laptop would easily keep up with a laptop with a mobile P4 CPU running 1000Mhz faster than the Pentium M machine and do it with better battery life! The Pentium M morphed into the Core Solo, then Core Duo and was refined into the desktop/mobile Core 2 Duo & Quad chips that we all know and loved back then.
It still astounds me just how fast PC tech moved at this time: only 5 years previous to this in 1996 retails stores were still selling 100MHz Pentium 1 machines with as little as 8mb RAM and 1mb VRAM and 500mb HDDs. This thing was a SUBNOTE with specs that were light years away, even with an underpowered CPU for the time. Just unreal.
I've had a few Transmeta machines over the years, a Sony "PictureBook" PCG-C1VN (that I owned, briefly), and a Compaq TC1000 (that was supplied by my work), they both really were hot garbage in performance terms, but battery life was admittedly pretty good (more so on the Compaq which had a much larger battery). They were acceptable performance for light office work which was definitely Compaq's target market, but Sony definitely pushed multimedia uses more, and they really fell flat there. I kinda wish I had tried to buy out the TC1000 when my work retired it, I did grab a later TC1100 which is the same form factor but Intel based.
I was surprised to hear no mention of Linus Torvalds, the most famous employee of Transmeta. I still remember him being quoted as having said: "When we're done you're going to want one."
I do miss the days when Sony made laptops. Everyone talks about how they make the PlayStation and all sorts of studio equipment, but they did make computers and other media devices. In fact, the first biggest commercial success was the first transistor radio.
this is back in a time when Sony was trying with their hardware other than their game console. I still have VAIO laptop with Vista. I actually loved it.
Yea those 1.8 ide drives are slower than molasses in a Chicago winter compared to everything else of the period. One can get an msata adapter to replace the old drive if desired.
I had high hopes for that CPU. I remember seeing it used in wearable computers. Big advantage was that it didn't get hot in wearable or portable devices.
I sometimes wonder if the Crusoe would fare better today. With ARM becoming more popular and RISC-V on the horizon, a processor that could run a number of instruction sets might become quite useful.
I love these ultra compact PC form factors. True, working with these is somewhat painful and impossible but to think that we can have a computer the size of a GameBoy always stuck with me.
Around 2004 a college professor of mine who also the creator of Kid Pix, has one of these variants of sub laptops from Sony. In the days of iPods and lampshade iMacs, it still exotic to see in the wild.
Sony’s infatuation of the time with the Spider-Man font continues… The fact they have the 4-pin FireWire with a separate DC jack next to it makes me wonder why they didn’t just put the 6-pin connector… it’s about as wide and only slightly taller. Oh well. Very interesting design.
It’s Sony being Sony, they trademarked the 4 pin FireWire as I.LINK and acted like it was theirs even though it was compatible with the 6 pin. Putting the 6 pin in would make too much sense for the company that tried to jam Memorystick down our throats!
Yea the marketing for the spider man movies from the 2000s is burned into my brain i remember seeing a trailer for it online it was so pixelated and choppy it was so funny.
I have a Thinclient based on the Transmeta Crusoe that I use for tinkering around with WinXP programs and as my Winamp music player. I would argue that for its time, the Crusoe was a very good CPU, especially considering how little power it uses. It would have been great if they had survived longer in the market, but in the end Intel copyed many of transmeta's technology and things moved on
The video port isn't specific to these computers. It's called Mini VGA and many apple computers sold between 2001-2005 used it as well. Ive used that sony adapter on an imac g4 and emac, and ive used the apple branded one on a sony picturebook.
20 yrs ago, we at work received tiny sony laptops that were touchscreen too. Cool little gadgets that came with a portable floppy drive. The best thing about them was that they were free - donated to our it recycling company
The Crusoe's X86 emulation speed bottleneck brings to mind the 68k emulator in the 1st generation Power Macintoshes: a simular speed bottleneck, I think.
Very cool. A lot of people might forget that unlike the US, Japan has an excellent rail system where people might find using something like this useful during a commute where physical space is at a premium. It is cool to see companies try these ideas out even if it doesn't pan out. Nowadays we see devices like the Samsung Galaxy Fold series which may be good enough to replace both phone & tablet in one go.
they had so many names for small computer back then, in the mid 2000's we got the UMPC (ultra mobile personal computer) which i think fits all those idea's and with GPD's computer this has made a comeback. so that leaves us with laptops, ultrabooks, and the rest is just a UMPC
One thing about computers or computing in general at the time was the innovation and excitement. We rarely see this in the PC world. We also have a lot less peripherals to choose from.
And then something like electric dictionary came out, was very popular in 2000s among students. I had one and still keep it, mainly used for the built in dictionary, some simple learning program, videos, songs and some built in simple game. Size about a small notepad maybe 4x6 inches. Damn brings back memories.
The Crusoe was all about moving the instruction scheduling from hardware to software. The idea was that if you aren't lighting up transistors to handle out of order execution in hardware that you might be able to beat it at power consumption in software.
Hey! Just watched Cathode Ray Dude's vid of the Crusoe-based VAIO and here's another one of these. Along with those media-center PCs and all sorts of weird things, VAIO sure was something else.
Really interesting stuff here. The emulation capability of the Crusoe makes me think of what is said about M1 chips from Apple, acording to Anaconda developers, it is believed M1 chips can emulate code instructions from x64 and then translate them to ARM architecture. So story repeats but now it seams that it worked very well.
I have the slim pentium 3 sony laptop. Its really cool looking but i try to only collect 2 brands of comouters. Decided to go with HP and Apple. I love hp laptops truly are some of the most beautiful laptops ever designed. The mid 2000s ones with the designs molded into the plastic, that hulk of a machine the dragon with a 21 inch display, the nice silver and black of the early 2000s i just love hp laptops even though they have made some mistakes but in all fairness all computers had video issues at the time.
The Crusoe was very interesting. VLIW wasn't used much in desktop CPUs, but outside of that saw some use. Like in Radeon HD 2000-4000 cards or in a modified form in Intel's X64 Itanium chips. And the possibility to add instruction extensions per update could make them long lived. In theory.
I had a Compaq TC1000 with the same CPU. The story I heard was Transmeta expected it to be as fast as an AMD/Intel CPU. However speed sucked with the first yields, but power was low. So instead they marketed it as a low power CPU instead.
I remember reading about Transmeta Crusoe in the magazines of the time, but never actually saw a machine that used it though. But then I never saw a Cyrix MediaGX either. And all PCs I've had were either Intel or AMD.
Reminds me of my teeny tiny Sharp Zaurus. It was even smaller and had a touch screen - which compensated a little bit for the terrible "keyboard". I thought it was an amazing bit of technology which worked great as a pocket sized terminal for working in data centres on my regular visits to fix our servers.
I live for these devices and whas thinking the same! i wouldn't mind having that chasis with a modern SoC, screen and days of battery life! Damn those were pretty!
I wish we were still building machines like that, or at least with that old Sony industrial design language. I find it so appealing. Great review as usual. Highlight of my morning so far.
Looks a little smaller, but thicker then the Atari ST Book, with a similar pointer device, though that came out in 1991 and as there were only around 1100 ever made, are hard to find today (but had features that are missing from todays laptops that could and should be useful!). Fascinating little machine here though, I know a few people who would have loved to have one of these back in it’s day.
Hah! I still have the Sony external DVD and CD drives (at 10:04) that I bought with my PCG-Z505. 20+ years old and they still work. Back then, my co-worker bought a PCG-C1VE and he used it for programming. Worked well on his commute too so I heard.
It seems some of their products for the Japanese market are still made there. Ultimately it doesn't have to be made in Japan to be quality anyway, any country can and does make high quality equipment if that's what they're paid to do. People blame 'China' etc, but ignore that the only reason for low quality is that companies and consumers just want whatever's cheapest. Very high quality products are also made in China and elsewhere. I've got a set of Bosch blue cordless tools, they're made in different countries such as Mexico, China, and I think US & Germany. The quality is the same on all of them.
Slightly later there were also the JVC Mini Note laptops using Intel ultra low voltage variants of the Pentium III. I bought one as a student 2004 and loved it. It already had WiFi and I upgraded it to 512MB. Though you had to compromise on the keyboard, if you got used to it wasn’t that bad. It was king when giving presentations or travel abroad. I used it for years and sold it a couple of years ago to a collector for a 100 bugs while still working including the batteries.
To be honest,the machine did not fail for me,i was way to young back than but the u3 , Especially the black , Reminds me so much of the current ,top of the line GPD WIN MAX units,even about the same weight,( 860 g) it is kind off the only one still being made with the clam shell design, But other than that style,they are many mini laptops today for gaming,like gpd win 3,steam deck,aya neo,etc This time only ,they actually use top of the line processors ,or at least serviceable ones
Many of the Japanese business men need to travel by walk or train every day to visit customers and probably even more 20 years ago so these small laptops made a lot of sense there. Panasonic still sells similar laptops even today in Japan.
These sorts of machines are quite useful for field servicing equipment that doesn’t have it’s own display. It doesn’t take much processing power to display a settings list, or flash the firmware of a machine… and being small is a big advantage when you have to haul it around along with a bag of tools.
Great point.
That was the point of regular laptops when they were invented
@@talkysassis Well, the first generations were aimed at business users; not technicians… but as machinery started to incorporate computer-derived control systems, technicians adapted the available portable computers to their work.
And it can run Windows or generic Linux, and therefore most of the software for servicing said equipment. And doesn't require a lot of dongles. Which is two things smartphones fail miserably to provide. That's why I'm a happy owner of GPD WIN.
@@darkwinter6028 That's interestinng and reminds me of what happened with mobile phones in Australia during their introduction in the 90s.
Apparently mobile phones in Australia started out aimed at the business sector, which failed. It ended up being construction workers that became the primary clients as they had a real need to be contacted out on the road or in the middle of a construction site. Your average businessman was ususally stuck behind a desk at the time and ususally relied on a desk phone.
The funny thing is people in the West often like to say the Crusoe failed. But it didn't - in Japan it was highly successful and quite a substantial number of different manufacturers used it, and whilst Western Crusoe-based machines do tend to be rare and hard to find, you can still find tonnes of different options in Japan.
Their first gen was a huge success but they could not keep up and only lasted a few years.
I had an the TC1000 HP/compaq tablet PC powered by a transmeta and have to say I was not very impressed by the power nor the battery life. Next year they offered one with a P3 mobile and was sprier without impacting much the battery life.
Well western people are assuming and arrogant ,what did you expect
except it did fail, both financially and as product offerings, seeing as the curve of performance per watt wasn't any better than their competitors, but overall performance was worse
It got discontinued, sounds like it failed to me.
The VAIO silver and lilac colour scheme and high-quality finish was a breath of fresh air in a boring world of grey laptops - and it still looks striking today.
I had one of the early magnesium VAIO 505 laptops and loved it to bits. Only my ThinkPad came close in the amount of work it did and abuse it took than that little machine.
COLOR*** not cOloUr
@@allentoyokawa9068 Europe and Canada disagree!
There were reports the Transmeta CPU would benchmark up to 20% faster on the second run through as the CPU adapted it's x86 emulation. I tested this with Quake on my U1 and sure enough the frame rate improved the second time. I love the black U3, always wanted one.
It’s a shame that wasn’t factored-in. That’s quite common with translation layers. :/
Hi Janus! First of all you make great videos! On transmeta - i have c1mhp. Its a disaster, even back in a day. Very slowwww. However this chip let sony make some great designs. But for me the greatest ones are u50 and ux. First more premium and unique, second more practical
@@kaitlyn__L Even the modern Rosetta 2 is basically same. It just does first run ahead of time so you don't see awful performance first
@@nurullahaksay funny, I was going to bring up how the first Rosetta was bad on the first run, but then I changed my second sentence to be more generic.
I knew Rosetta 2 had a hybrid model involving JIT recompilation and then saving the results to memory, but I was unaware it did a silent first-pass. So that’s neat.
Same thing with WINE and Proton!
Funnily enough, the form factor isn't exactly dead. GPD made the Win Max and that gaming laptop looks quite similar to the PCG-U1. The Win 1 and Win 2 are a bit nicer to type on when held in both hands because they're smaller.
I own a GPD Win 3 that looks like a Vaio UMPC. Something i always wanted
Yea i kind of want one since my smart phone has too many artificial limitations but these days i don't travel much so it would be a waste and i worry about windows lagging out all the time when i want to do something quickly on public transport.
I also have a WIN3, as well as a couple of the older top-end UX handhelds. The WIN3 is definitely the heir apparent to the UX design ethic, I love it.
Also have one, totally pleased by it,even one year later
@@belstar1128 to be honest it is really practical for me,(gpd win max,not gpd win 3)i use it as the main drive,for more than one year never felt like it is slow,
Even if i don't use it that much, every time i do,i noticed the experience in a good way,Dont have to lift a heavy leptop, i just take it from the same place i put my phone to charge,most of the time i would even use the same charger,
It can game nice, trough the battery dies fast this way, just for light tasks ,like video watching ,it has longer screen time than most phones,
I guess the thing i use it the most is video watching, because of the screen stand
The speakers are close to horrible
I worked for Transmeta from 2000 to 2002. It was an exciting time for sure. One thing the CEO pushed was that these systems weren't intended to be desktop replacements. Instead, they were meant as portable companions to a desktop PC, and never meant to be speed demons. Some of the hardware that used the processor was *very* cool though. I'm glad to have been employed there at the time.
That's funny, just recently I was watching a Cathode Ray Dude video about a similar Sony laptop with an integrated camcorder, also making use of the Crusoe CPU. The funny thing is, despite the whole point of that laptop being the camcorder functionality, the CPU was too weak to actually handle video encode which held it back quite a bit. Interesting to see this one also using it.
I literally watched that video yesterday then this drops, spooky
VIAO wad always aimed at making multimedia PC's basically High end workstations and Sony lifestyle systems like Apple computers but cheaper
As crt mentioned. Sony was a company which built things outside the bubble, taking devices to another level.
The overlap between the viewership of CRD and this channel has got to be quite significant.
@@flp322 It's incredible how many other recognizable tech channels I see in the comments of other videos.
I bought a U3 when I was in high school, it cost me most of my savings. I used it for a few months, but ended up selling it because it wasn't fast enough for what I wanted to do. Got my money back when I sold it and was happy to have experienced that little machine's uniqueness.
You mentioned how hard those software and driver disks are to find, I really hope you imaged those you have there and uploaded them to the Internet archive
100%
I owned a PCG-U3 back in the day. This series was something else entirely. Exotic, extremely cute, with a crazy good display. I miss the times when such creativity was allowed. Thank you for this review which took me back !
可愛いね？
@@MaoRatto とてもかわいい ：）
such creativity was allowed ? Artistic skills you do, apple is what you need
Forget the Windows crap you need ! Demand a better solution = apple !
Apple suck
Yes those were great times for micro laptops. I remember Casio Fiva also using similar type low-power CPUs. But my favourite will always be Fujitsu mini laptops, they don’t have that sticky rubber coatings or the crack screen like Sony laptops after prolonged storage.
That CPU has some sorcery built into it, the more you run the same stuff the more it adapts and gets better at it, all while consuming much less power since it has less transistors.
Having grown up only seeing Intel and AMD it is very interesting to me seeing other x86 CPUs like the Cyrix, Transmeta and VIA. I suspect the same would be true for younger people and graphic card manufacturers.
I will say having worked on Cyrix machines it had potential to be right on par with AMD in the 90's, but VIA never stood a chance on anything but really low power draw, as their chips both CPU, and IGPU were really slow with bad driver support, and not even a low resource Linux distro like Puppy could help them, as I owned a few VIA C7 based motherboards I put into service with my church in he mid 00's, and some Everex VIA C7 based laptops I bought for nieces, and nephews as gifts.
@@CommodoreFan64 most of VIA chips were based on the Winchip, not Cyrix.
@@Voidsworn Trust me, I'm well aware of that, and read my comment again, as I never said VIA was based on Cyrix, just that Cyrix had potential, and that VIA was over promised hot garbage, with their only advantage being power draw.
@@CommodoreFan64 my bad. I read more into that than was there. :)
Linus Torvalds worked for Transmeta for a while.
This is what I miss the most from the late 90s/early 00s... Originality. I imagine having a desing like that, with a modern hardware, that would be dope
Another example of amazing consumer technology sold only in Japan. I vaguely remember Transmeta and their Crusoe CPUs.
You'd appreciate a thumbs up would you? Well your down right getting one. This channel is quickly becoming my favourite for retro tech up there with LGR and Techmoan.
Check out cathode Ray dude
Will do. Thank you buddy
You're, not your.
After watching this great video, now my new favorite channel also!
oh my, what memories! I had a U1 when I used to travel to Japan often for work between 2001-2011. I bought a U1, and then later a U50 and later still a UX50 all when they were new during my years working over there. As much as I loved them for their beyond cool gadget factor, the practicalities of actually using them always eventually came to the fore, and I'd move back to using a more normal laptop. I remember sitting in an office using the U1 to write my reports to my boss. My colleagues would take great pleasure on teasing me over just how tiny my little machine was (ahem).... I remember a colleague sending me an email where he had purposely set the font size as large as he could. When I opened it on the U1, even just a single letter would fill the screen. Everyone thought this was pretty hilarious, and indeed it was :-) I gave soooo much money to Sony (and to Yodobashi Camera) during my years in Japan. Great memories (lighter wallet). Fantastic video, thank you for the memories! I don't have the U1 anymore, I think I sold it to a friend back when it was still quite new. The U50 and UX50 I think I still have somewhere though. No idea if they still work, but I should try!
Japanese tech in the 80s and 90s was the best part of our timeline.
I can imagine Japanese salary men on the Shinkansen getting work done between the grind.
For sure, even the early 2000s had that spark if only a less so than the 90's.
The western world never understood how far ahead they were for their time unfortunately, very few bleeding edge Japanese electronics actually got exported here
Japan bubble era. Since 2000's they were slowly overtook by Korean counterpart and then American based company. Today, china is beating Japan with robot vacuum tech and smartphone
Yeah it was great envying what I wish we had in USA lol
Used to have something similar in size. It's great for stuffing behind your DM screen for D&D. 😁
In Japan in the 2000s, notebook PCs with a Crusoe were common, so I was surprised to find that they were not common in other countries.
Mini disk, Japan did do weird needs .....
High End Palm system, lol !
Only apple is able to do this
I remember when these Sub notebooks came out. I wanted one SO BAD! The Toshiba Libretto and Sony Vaio P series were so cool! I loved anything with a tiny color LCD and full keyboard like the the LG Phenom which ran win CE. I ended up scoring a like new HP Omnibook 800 Subnotebook and a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 tablet pc off ebay in the early 2000's that I still have in my collection.
We needed ARM for this, and not Microsoft !
Oh! A friend of mine bought one in Japan. At its time, it was amazing to see such small laptop running WinXP and with so many options!
I am certainly glad there's companies out there that still try and make these things like GPD the packet three has been awesome brings back memories of the various miniature devices I saw along the way that I could never afford.
The Transmeta Crusoe chips. I remember the hype for them before they were released. I was working as a service supervisor & later service manager of a laptop repair depo in the 2000's and I remember talking to several of our corporate clients about the Transmeta chips. The low power & battery life claims had them interested, especially for companies that a very mobile work force like sales reps as one example but the disappointing performance results quelled much of that interest.
IMO the best thing that Transmeta brought to the table is it forced Intel and to a lesser degree AMD to focus more on power saving features in their mobile CPUs. The Pentium 4's power issues also helped this along greatly! It also didn't hurt Transmeta that a number of laptop OEMs in the late 90s and early 2000s had tried to stuff a desktop CPU into a few models of their laptops, usually with less than stellar results.
I can still remember the Toshiba Satellite 5005 or 5105 that had a desktop P3 1.13 ghz CPU in it. Sure the laptop was very fast for it's time, but the battery life on it was almost non-existent. The machine ran really hot and had a noisy fan. And if the heatsink wasn't properly cleaned often (which most home users didn't do!) the machine would overheat and either tank performance or shut off entirely. The issue was so bad that I think Toshiba had to extend the warranty on that model for an extra 6-18 months due to how often that happened. That's just one example but there were several others back then.
The introduction of the Pentium M really sealed the fate of Transmeta when laptops with those chips were released in 2003. A Pentium M based laptop would easily keep up with a laptop with a mobile P4 CPU running 1000Mhz faster than the Pentium M machine and do it with better battery life! The Pentium M morphed into the Core Solo, then Core Duo and was refined into the desktop/mobile Core 2 Duo & Quad chips that we all know and loved back then.
It still astounds me just how fast PC tech moved at this time: only 5 years previous to this in 1996 retails stores were still selling 100MHz Pentium 1 machines with as little as 8mb RAM and 1mb VRAM and 500mb HDDs. This thing was a SUBNOTE with specs that were light years away, even with an underpowered CPU for the time. Just unreal.
6:35 This is how all modern Intel and AMD CPUs work like as well. Internally they are RISC, but they have an x86 front-end.
I've had a few Transmeta machines over the years, a Sony "PictureBook" PCG-C1VN (that I owned, briefly), and a Compaq TC1000 (that was supplied by my work), they both really were hot garbage in performance terms, but battery life was admittedly pretty good (more so on the Compaq which had a much larger battery). They were acceptable performance for light office work which was definitely Compaq's target market, but Sony definitely pushed multimedia uses more, and they really fell flat there. I kinda wish I had tried to buy out the TC1000 when my work retired it, I did grab a later TC1100 which is the same form factor but Intel based.
Yep those Transmeta chips were truly awful.
I was surprised to hear no mention of Linus Torvalds, the most famous employee of Transmeta. I still remember him being quoted as having said: "When we're done you're going to want one."
I wanted to do a video on the Transmeta processors as I've always been obsessed with them. But plans to make a video didn't pan out. Great video!
I do miss the days when Sony made laptops. Everyone talks about how they make the PlayStation and all sorts of studio equipment, but they did make computers and other media devices. In fact, the first biggest commercial success was the first transistor radio.
this is back in a time when Sony was trying with their hardware other than their game console. I still have VAIO laptop with Vista. I actually loved it.
That powermate Eco looked awesome wow.
Yea those 1.8 ide drives are slower than molasses in a Chicago winter compared to everything else of the period. One can get an msata adapter to replace the old drive if desired.
I had high hopes for that CPU. I remember seeing it used in wearable computers. Big advantage was that it didn't get hot in wearable or portable devices.
I sometimes wonder if the Crusoe would fare better today. With ARM becoming more popular and RISC-V on the horizon, a processor that could run a number of instruction sets might become quite useful.
The forthcoming GPD Win Max 2 is effectively the modern equivalent to this, complete with a handheld form factor. Check it out!
I loved the U1 for it's colors and look. It really sings to me and I'd love to have one in a display in my collection. :3
@1:35 I'm like 90% sure you could invert the mouse click functions using the regular settings. If not Auto Hotkey will definitely work.
I love these ultra compact PC form factors.
True, working with these is somewhat painful and impossible but to think that we can have a computer the size of a GameBoy always stuck with me.
Around 2004 a college professor of mine who also the creator of Kid Pix, has one of these variants of sub laptops from Sony. In the days of iPods and lampshade iMacs, it still exotic to see in the wild.
This is nice! I had a Flybook Dialogue with a 1Ghz Transmeta Crusoe cpu and a few years ago I bought it once again for some retro gaming.
Wow i totally forgot about the crusoe cpu's, i remember it was a big deal when it launched but never took off.
Sony’s infatuation of the time with the Spider-Man font continues…
The fact they have the 4-pin FireWire with a separate DC jack next to it makes me wonder why they didn’t just put the 6-pin connector… it’s about as wide and only slightly taller. Oh well.
Very interesting design.
It’s Sony being Sony, they trademarked the 4 pin FireWire as I.LINK and acted like it was theirs even though it was compatible with the 6 pin. Putting the 6 pin in would make too much sense for the company that tried to jam Memorystick down our throats!
I don't think Sony themselves know why they did that, Lolz.
The Sony Style
Yea the marketing for the spider man movies from the 2000s is burned into my brain i remember seeing a trailer for it online it was so pixelated and choppy it was so funny.
Sony's VAIO laptops up until like 2013ish or so were some of the most gorgeous laptops ever!
I have a Thinclient based on the Transmeta Crusoe that I use for tinkering around with WinXP programs and as my Winamp music player. I would argue that for its time, the Crusoe was a very good CPU, especially considering how little power it uses. It would have been great if they had survived longer in the market, but in the end Intel copyed many of transmeta's technology and things moved on
I love this videos about old and not common computers, great channel!
The video port isn't specific to these computers. It's called Mini VGA and many apple computers sold between 2001-2005 used it as well. Ive used that sony adapter on an imac g4 and emac, and ive used the apple branded one on a sony picturebook.
These were actually called ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC)
That zoom in is such a cheat! It just lowers the res lmao
That would look nice next to my Vaio Pentium 4 desktop
20 yrs ago, we at work received tiny sony laptops that were touchscreen too. Cool little gadgets that came with a portable floppy drive.
The best thing about them was that they were free - donated to our it recycling company
More VAIO Stuff? man, quite I had some flashbacks with the Sony VAIO back in late 2000's.
i still can't get over how cool the crusoe was!! really wish there was more of that sort of innovation in the cpu space these days
I never had such device, never even heard of it, but this video somehow hit me with nostalgia like a truck.
These things were huge in Asia
Have you looked into the Sony Vaio UX series. I remember seeing one in a Staples and thinking, "That tiny thing is a full-on computer?!"
Hey Colin. Love your videos hope you have a great day!
Hi Colin 👍 I have a U3 with OK screen that I will be glad to give you or swap for something of equal value if you are interested 👍
I remember the Transmeta Crusoe having worked on Tablet PC with them. That was such a sluggish and slow chip... but energy efficient for sure...
The Crusoe's X86 emulation speed bottleneck brings to mind the 68k emulator in the 1st generation Power Macintoshes: a simular speed bottleneck, I think.
I would like to see how a linux would fair with that processor, maybe one that is compiled to work with the original processor
Can see where the GPD win max got it's design from.
Very cool. A lot of people might forget that unlike the US, Japan has an excellent rail system where people might find using something like this useful during a commute where physical space is at a premium. It is cool to see companies try these ideas out even if it doesn't pan out. Nowadays we see devices like the Samsung Galaxy Fold series which may be good enough to replace both phone & tablet in one go.
I have the sequel to this, the PCG-U101. Amazing little laptops
Sony VAIO was a cool ass brand in general. They cranked out some neat gadgets.
VAIO videos are such a delight! I miss them so much.
they had so many names for small computer back then, in the mid 2000's we got the UMPC (ultra mobile personal computer) which i think fits all those idea's and with GPD's computer this has made a comeback. so that leaves us with laptops, ultrabooks, and the rest is just a UMPC
One thing about computers or computing in general at the time was the innovation and excitement. We rarely see this in the PC world. We also have a lot less peripherals to choose from.
And then something like electric dictionary came out, was very popular in 2000s among students. I had one and still keep it, mainly used for the built in dictionary, some simple learning program, videos, songs and some built in simple game. Size about a small notepad maybe 4x6 inches.
Damn brings back memories.
The Crusoe was all about moving the instruction scheduling from hardware to software. The idea was that if you aren't lighting up transistors to handle out of order execution in hardware that you might be able to beat it at power consumption in software.
Hey! Just watched Cathode Ray Dude's vid of the Crusoe-based VAIO and here's another one of these. Along with those media-center PCs and all sorts of weird things, VAIO sure was something else.
I've never heard of a Crusoe CPU and MicroDIMM for RAM until now. Thank you Colin I sure learned somethings new here.
Really interesting stuff here.
The emulation capability of the Crusoe makes me think of what is said about M1 chips from Apple, acording to Anaconda developers, it is believed M1 chips can emulate code instructions from x64 and then translate them to ARM architecture. So story repeats but now it seams that it worked very well.
ARM was always the better solution, Windows was always the best crap people bought ......
I have the slim pentium 3 sony laptop. Its really cool looking but i try to only collect 2 brands of comouters. Decided to go with HP and Apple. I love hp laptops truly are some of the most beautiful laptops ever designed. The mid 2000s ones with the designs molded into the plastic, that hulk of a machine the dragon with a 21 inch display, the nice silver and black of the early 2000s i just love hp laptops even though they have made some mistakes but in all fairness all computers had video issues at the time.
The Crusoe was very interesting. VLIW wasn't used much in desktop CPUs, but outside of that saw some use. Like in Radeon HD 2000-4000 cards or in a modified form in Intel's X64 Itanium chips.
And the possibility to add instruction extensions per update could make them long lived. In theory.
I still have a Compaq TC1000 with a Crusoe 1Ghz running XP.
Dunno why but I love this kind of old hardware.
It's like a time machine (for me).
A very unique Netbook was the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_2133_Mini-Note_PC
He used a Via C7 CPU.
It would be interesting to try to put upgrade the U1 with an SSD or a memory card instead of the HHD.
I had a Compaq TC1000 with the same CPU. The story I heard was Transmeta expected it to be as fast as an AMD/Intel CPU. However speed sucked with the first yields, but power was low. So instead they marketed it as a low power CPU instead.
I absolutely love that keyboard font hahaha
God I miss subnotebooks and netbooks. PC developers have long since abandoned the all-important cute factor.
I remember reading about Transmeta Crusoe in the magazines of the time, but never actually saw a machine that used it though. But then I never saw a Cyrix MediaGX either. And all PCs I've had were either Intel or AMD.
In South America they are impossible to find. Things from living in the third world :D
Reminds me of my teeny tiny Sharp Zaurus. It was even smaller and had a touch screen - which compensated a little bit for the terrible "keyboard". I thought it was an amazing bit of technology which worked great as a pocket sized terminal for working in data centres on my regular visits to fix our servers.
Oh wow, I used to have that little gadget back then. It was handy when commuting in train while web browsing.
I'd buy one just to try all those super light linux distros
Love the look of that laptop
I half expected a “when computers were fun” things like Mr Mobile at the end
Sony's sub notebooks might have a chance nowadays with Android or ChromeOS.
I live for these devices and whas thinking the same! i wouldn't mind having that chasis with a modern SoC, screen and days of battery life! Damn those were pretty!
If you think that is small, then check the Sharp Zaurus SL-C series. Although classified as a PDA it is actually a tiny laptop with Linux.
I wish we were still building machines like that, or at least with that old Sony industrial design language. I find it so appealing. Great review as usual. Highlight of my morning so far.
Looks a little smaller, but thicker then the Atari ST Book, with a similar pointer device, though that came out in 1991 and as there were only around 1100 ever made, are hard to find today (but had features that are missing from todays laptops that could and should be useful!).
Fascinating little machine here though, I know a few people who would have loved to have one of these back in it’s day.
Use bestine to get off that sticky residue off without damaging the plastics and paints.
I wonder if one could upgrade this in the same way that you do with the iPod iflash. Id like to see what that would change
Hah! I still have the Sony external DVD and CD drives (at 10:04) that I bought with my PCG-Z505. 20+ years old and they still work. Back then, my co-worker bought a PCG-C1VE and he used it for programming. Worked well on his commute too so I heard.
2:42 Made in Japan.
Holy shit I miss seeing that on electronics!!!!
It seems some of their products for the Japanese market are still made there. Ultimately it doesn't have to be made in Japan to be quality anyway, any country can and does make high quality equipment if that's what they're paid to do.
People blame 'China' etc, but ignore that the only reason for low quality is that companies and consumers just want whatever's cheapest. Very high quality products are also made in China and elsewhere.
I've got a set of Bosch blue cordless tools, they're made in different countries such as Mexico, China, and I think US & Germany. The quality is the same on all of them.
Slightly later there were also the JVC Mini Note laptops using Intel ultra low voltage variants of the Pentium III. I bought one as a student 2004 and loved it. It already had WiFi and I upgraded it to 512MB. Though you had to compromise on the keyboard, if you got used to it wasn’t that bad. It was king when giving presentations or travel abroad. I used it for years and sold it a couple of years ago to a collector for a 100 bugs while still working including the batteries.
linus torvalds worked at transmeta,i dont think the idea died really it just moved to tablets and arm cpus
To be honest,the machine did not fail for me,i was way to young back than but the u3 , Especially the black , Reminds me so much of the current ,top of the line GPD WIN MAX units,even about the same weight,( 860 g) it is kind off the only one still being made with the clam shell design,
But other than that style,they are many mini laptops today for gaming,like gpd win 3,steam deck,aya neo,etc
This time only ,they actually use top of the line processors ,or at least serviceable ones
Many of the Japanese business men need to travel by walk or train every day to visit customers and probably even more 20 years ago so these small laptops made a lot of sense there. Panasonic still sells similar laptops even today in Japan.
I had one of these. The Vaio PCG-U3. It was amazin piece of tech. i still have the original software somewhere. And some pics too.
The lower part of it reminds me of the GPD Win Max