My First Portable MP3 Rig

I’d like to share some pictures of my first portable MP3 player. I think it was around 1997 when I first discovered MP3 music. Like many others, I spent countless evenings searching for MP3 files online — mostly on obscure FTP servers whose access codes were shared on forums and Usenet. Some servers allowed anonymous access, but they were extremely hard to find.

Back then, the only way I could connect to the internet at home was through a telephone modem. So if I managed to find and download three good songs in one evening, that already felt like a huge success.

The heart of my setup was a Panasonic CF-25 Mk3 — a rugged industrial laptop weighing about three kilos. It had its own carrying handle, so there was no need for a laptop bag. You could even walk around with it (or drop it!) while it was running without much risk of damage. The headphone jack was conveniently located on the front.

It had a 4 GB hard drive, with about one gigabyte reserved for music and the rest for the OS and work files. It ran Windows NT 4, and I used Winamp as my main MP3 player. With an Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA card and an external SCSI CD drive, I could even rip CDs — though ripping a full CD often took an entire night! Unfortunately, I didn’t have the original internal SelectBay CD drive for the laptop at the time.

Battery life with the lid closed was around four hours, but I had a custom external battery pack that added another six. I used the setup everywhere — in the car with a cassette adapter, in a backpack on my motorcycle, on public transport, on airplanes with headphones, and at home or in hotel rooms on mains power paired with a set of Sony Sports external speakers. It even doubled as a jukebox at private parties, connected to full AV systems.

For a few years, this was my ultimate portable music companion (later replaced by a Panasonic CF-27), until I finally bought my first commercial MP3 player at the end of 2000 — a Philips Expanium EXP-101 MP3 CD player.

I hope you enjoy the pictures and story. I’d love to hear what your setup was like in the early days of MP3s, before the first commercial players hit the market.

 

Interesting to see a early Toughbook. How much did it cost you back then?
The only "Laptop" I had back then was a Toshiba T3100, which was mains only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100

Toughbooks are still made and they recently purchased a couple of Toughbook 55s at work.
https://eu.connect.panasonic.com/gb/en/toughbook/toughbook-rugged-laptops-tablets/rugged-laptops

 

I made money with the laptop. Simply put, I traveled with it to all sorts of remote places around the world where there was oil. There, I used it for data acquisition. I brought the data back with me. Then I analyzed it and wrote a report. This repeated itself constantly, so I was constantly traveling with it.

The new cost of the laptop was low compared to the commercial value of the data I had on it. But it was expensive. You could buy a new car for it. Meanwhile, with its MP3 library, it was the best travel companion you could wish for back then. It was the most important thing I had with me, and it never let me down. Although, over time, the original ones I had didn't look as good as this one. They got a real beating.

That T3100 was far too slow to decode MP3s and didn't have a sound card, right? It was long destined for a museum by then

 

If you are in for a vintage Toughbook, the Panasonic CF-27 Mk4 is the real holy grail. It's a Pentium 3 model. It supports Dos/W95/W98/NT4/W2000/XP FLP/XP/Linux without any problems. It also accepts the Samsung HM160HC IDE HDD without any problems (although it only sees the first 120 GB). HDD caddies are still available, inexpensive, and quick to swap. It has a well-functioning USB port and the coolest feature: a touchscreen. One thing to watch out for is that the sound card often doesn't work. This isn't a software problem, but a hardware failure. The main problem is that they are quite rare.

I recently used it to upgrade the firmware on a Creative Zen Touch MP3 player so I can access the player's HDD directly with Windows Explorer. I needed Windows XP SP2 for this. I also use it, for example, to communicate with my old TI calculator via the serial Ti-Link cable. Thanks to its easily interchangeable HDD caddies, it's a great universal tool for keeping older hardware running. It's also a fun laptop for old-school gaming

 

You didn't mention using the computer for work in your original post giving me the impression that you only used it for MP3s.
Regarding the work purpose I'm sure most people here will have heard of Texas Instruments. They started out as an oil surveying company before branching out into semiconductors.

As for my Toshiba T3100 that was an ex corporate machine I bought with my own "hobbies" money for a couple of £hundred. I think I got it before getting any kind of desktop PC. Unlike the next laptop I bought I did get some use out of it running MS Works for DOS for letters etc. Computers at work back then were always desktops so not portable.

Where I work now has quite a few Toughbooks (ranging from 1 to 15 years old) including a CF20 which you can convert into a tablet by detaching the keyboard.

 

Yes, they still make them. I must admit that after those first CF-25s, I've never used any other laptops than the Panasonics. I'm so used to their quirks. I miss the old Notebookreview forum. We were constantly doing the coolest hacks on those Toughbooks. My favorite is still the CF-19. In my opinion, it's truly the ultimate evolution of the old CF-25. The CF-20 is fun. But I find it a bit too fragile. The problems with the touchpad stop working and the screen suddenly staying black are also annoying. But I'm typing this on a 20 now. If I ever want a new modern one, it'll be the FZ-40. But of course, that's completely outside the scope of this forum. It's also completely out of my budget right now haha

 

Ahh, I remember these old Toughbooks! PCMag and PCWorld magazines used to have countless ads and reviews for them during the XP days, and I could never figure out back then who the primary customer was. Today, these laptops are still very common in the US among public service workers (ie. police and medical staff), but I've personally never seen anyone cary one for personal use like this. Very cool usage tbh, and I'd much rather be carrying one of these out in the open than one of the flimsy plastic laptops of this time period (although IBM think pads were another very durable laptop).

 

Cool story. I was heavy into PC's back in the late 90's up to 2006 and was looking on e-bay around 06' to buy a Panasonic Toughbook. Never did though.

 

2006+ were great times! Those were the days of the CF-18. It was so incredibly upgradeable with custom and self-built features, like ultra-powerful Wi-Fi, a 3G modem, GPS, an IDE to SATA adapter, allowing for a nice big drive for MP3s, and powerful Bluetooth sticks via the internal USB port for those early wireless headphones and speakers. And all of that was on the inside of the laptop, so it was still an ultra-portable machine. Another remarkable feature was that it could be a tablet, long before the iPad came along. It had a real speaker on the bottom, so if you turned the laptop upside down, it sounded reasonably good and bassy so it could function as a small boombox as well

It's a pity you never persevered, because it was a really good machine for hardware hacking fun. Especially since it could later run Windows 7 with a bit of tweaking of the video card drivers, I kept using it for a long time

 

How about those Toshiba Librettos? While I was sitting on airports with that heavy brick Panasonic laptop, I also saw people with those mini laptops. Were they any good at playing MP3s in the late '90s? I thought it might be a good idea, but I never got around to actually getting one for my MP3 library.