Say hello to the Ricoh NP-50 - The mini laptop that doesn't exist!

[eightbit]

Except...that it does. This is an odd one indeed and one of the most mysterious oddware pieces I own. About a year or two ago I was at a flea market with my brother and spotted a small cardboard box with the "Ricoh" logo on it. I automatically assumed this was a toner cartridge, but when I saw the side of the box it had an MMX logo and system spec information (233MHz MMX, 3GB hard drive, etc). I opened the box and it was what appeared to be a brand new miniature laptop. I asked the guy manning the table what he wanted and he told me to shoot him an offer. I offered $5 and he accepted.

 

I took it home and inspected the package contents. It included the laptop, a matching external LPT floppy drive, a nicely done user manual, a sealed copy of Windows 98 on CD, charger and power cable, and a few extra new mouse nubs.

 

I threw it on a charge for a few hours and...nope. The batteries will no longer take a charge. I removed them from the laptop to inspect and see if I could find replacements online. There are two 2700MAh batteries and lights on the unit for each one (left and right). I could not find anything online about them or the laptop for that matter. Nothing that Ricoh ever even released a laptop at all. Strange.

 

Luckily the unit works without batteries on the power brick. No longer portable but oh well. Upon inspection I find it has a serial port, VGA out, PS2 port, three cardbus slots, one USB port in the front, headphone and mic jacks in the front, LPT port (that is labeled for floppy OR printer), and a door on the bottom that houses a CR2032 battery and the memory. Turning on the machine revealed 96MB of ram and a Pentium 233MHz MMX processor. I could get into the BIOS but the machine would not boot. Just some strange number code. I suspected the hard drive to be dead...and I could see no way of accessing it without opening the machine. I packed it away and figured it would be a project for another day.

 

Fast forward to this past week. We had a major Nor'Easter on the east cost and my job closed for the day. I figured this would be a good a time as any to bring this machine back down from the closet as I have been thinking about it recently. I tried again to boot from USB, nope. I tried to boot from a MS-DOS boot disk and that worked. I went to FDISK the drive and it was seen! It was simply not partitioned or formatted. I did that and now I get the appropriate "no system disk" message on boot.

 

Now time to find out HOW I can get Windows 98 on this. It has Windows 98 stickers so I figured that would suite it. The thing came with a new CD of Windows 98, but no CD drive! And I have no PCMCIA CD-ROM units either. I checked my software archive and lo and behold I had a copy of Windows 98 First Edition on floppy...38 floppies! So off I went...

 

The installation takes forever from floppy disk and I do not recommend it at all. It works fine if you don;t have a power outage on disk 36 like I did. Yes, I am a glutton for punishment and I went ahead and started the whole darn thing over again when the power came back on the next day. It runs you through disks 1-38, and then requests disk 6, and then 12, and then 20-38 AGAIN. Holy crap.

 

Anyway, when the installation was complete I was able to install an "unofficial usb mass storage driver" for USB sticks for Win98 FE and that worked. I was now able to read USB sticks in the OS. Funny...it reads a 128GB USB flash drive and the internal hard drive is only 3GB From there I installed the usual tools...daemon tools for ISO mounting, 7zip, Plus! 98 (need those themes) and some other stuff. I split the drive in half using partition magic and used Symantec Ghost to image the primary partition to the second drive. Now I have a backup and will not have to deal with another floppy installation of Win98 again. 38 disks. Microsoft was just plain sadistic with that version of the release...but I am glad they released it.

 

Anyway, this thing is done and it runs quite nicely. Too bad it is not truly portable anymore. I emailed Ricoh as a last ditch effort to try to find any history on this machine but received no reply. They probably think I am some old nutjob or something.

 

Anyway, say hello to the laptop that does not exist...except for right here in my room. If anyone has any information on the Ricoh NP-50 miniature laptop please let me know!

[eightbit]

I probably should have added something for scale. This think is TINY. If a 20oz Coke was standing next to it I think it would be about the height or maybe a few millimeters taller than it. The keys are tiny but feel nice. It is the size of a small book when closed. The screen is a crisp TFT display. And, the best part was no driver issues. Win98FE found everything

Edited March 11, 2018 by eightbit

[pacman000]

38 floppies!?

 

XD

 

Still, that's probably smaller than most OSes today.

 

Where'd you get the USB driver? I'd like to get some old stuff off a Win98 PC, but can't find a compatible thumb drive anymore. Would that driver let the PC read newer thumb drives?

[eightbit]

38 floppies!?

 

XD

 

Still, that's probably smaller than most OSes today.

 

Where'd you get the USB driver? I'd like to get some old stuff off a Win98 PC, but can't find a compatible thumb drive anymore. Would that driver let the PC read newer thumb drives?

 

 

This driver is for first edition:

 

http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/win98fe-usb-mass-storage-drivers.php

 

But if you need the driver for second edition:

 

http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/win98se-usb-mass-storage-drivers.php

 

 

Don't worry about the service pack they mention. The driver works fine without it. I have used these mass storage drivers on various Win98 machines and it always works fine. It is simply the USB mass storage driver from ME modified to install on 98...but I believe they have added support for a lot more as it works with my latest 128 and 256GB drives. There has not been a single USB drive that has not been recognized for me...and I have used dozens of drives

Edited March 12, 2018 by eightbit

[pacman000]

Thank you so very very much.

[Opry99er]

Cooooool!!

[KC LAW]

Hello,

 

The machine is wonderful & what I'm long looking for!!

 

Ricoh did make some investment on laptop development in 1990s, with IBM.

 

Your Ricoh NP-50 should be a similar one to IBM thinkpad 235 or Hitachi VisionBook Traveler 600 or 3745, all of these use 2 camcorder batteries with each battery insert to both sides of the laptop to power up.

 

the following web-site may inspire you:

https://laptop.pics/chandra/?fbclid=IwAR2E0xO2Tx-1hMGjnwt-QEd9rWlwF2ThPBH2ETccmjR1cQXF46QkuiuVfrk

 

Do some research on "IBM thinkpad 235" voltage / battery spec, then compare with your Ricoh NP-50, and then...

...if somewhere selling camcorder battery nears you, just bring your laptop to see if you manage to find 2 camcorder batteries which fit for use.

 

[jhd]

I am impressed that you found a system complete with external floppy drive and power cables. I have several times seen old laptops for very cheap, but none included the power cable -- making them little more than a doorstop.  

[+OLD CS1]

On 3/10/2018 at 11:08 PM, eightbit said:

They probably think I am some old nutjob or something.

"We're all mad here."

[Andres99907]

I have this laptop and I could never find the power adapter :(, How is it? can you send me a picture of the adapter?