Uladzimir Kazakevich's Sleeper-Build Toshiba T1200 Upgrade Hides a Raspberry Pi Inside

Maker Uladzimir Kazakevich has breathed new life into a classic laptop, turning a Toshiba T1200 into a sleeper build powered by a Raspberry Pi — while retaining the original keyboard.

"Resurrecting a classic for cyberdeck build," Kazakevich says of his project. "The details: kept the original Toshiba T1200 case and keyboard; brains [are a] Raspberry Pi 4 [Model] B; power [is USB] power bank powered. The best part is the keyboard acoustics. There is a plenty of space to put anything inside T1200. So it can be quite powerful."

The Toshiba T1200 can, indeed, be made considerably more powerful than its manufacturer intended, which is a relatively low bar given that the folding laptop launched in 1987 for $6,499 — the equivalent of an eye-watering $18,695.21 corrected for inflation — with an Intel 80C86, the CMOS version of the company's first-generation x86-architecture processor, running at up to 9.54MHz and with 1MB of RAM.

Kazakevich's build swaps out the original motherboard for a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B that, despite ongoing price hikes prompted by the artificial intelligence market's insatiable demand for RAM, offers dramatically improved performance at a fraction of the original cost. It can even boast compatibility with MS-DOS and applications written for the original Toshiba and other IBM compatibles, albeit only via software emulation of the x86 architecture.

The display, too, has been upgraded: what was a 640×200 single-color CGA-compatible display with 80×25 text-mode support is now a full-color ultrawide panel. The one thing that Kazakevich didn't change, beyond the casing itself: the keyboard, which retains its thwocky acoustics while being switched over to USB compatibility thanks to a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller interface.

More information is available in Kazakevich's Reddit post.