Toshiba...we hardly knew ya

CAD4466HK

CAD4466HK

2[H]4U
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Jul 24, 2008
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pendragon1 said:
i thought dynabook took them over years ago? or was that just up here?
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That was just their PC business. Dynabook is a Sharp brand. Toshiba has been bleeding money for a decade at this point, having sold off most of its subsidiaries in the ensuing years. The bleeding was the result of multiple accounting scandals and their Westinghouse blunder.
 
A name that will be missed........but damned if I've owned anything made by Toshiba since the mid 80's...I mean, anything branded as Toshiba......
 
I was a Toshiba certified PC technician back in the 1990's. They were the brand to have in terms of quality for laptops. I had a few of their consumer electronics up through the 1990's but post 2000's I don't think I've had anything made by them.
 
Dan_D said:
I was a Toshiba certified PC technician back in the 1990's. They were the brand to have in terms of quality for laptops. I had a few of their consumer electronics up through the 1990's but post 2000's I don't think I've had anything made by them.
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Yeah the Satellites were very well sought after by many of my clientele.
 
CAD4466HK said:
Yeah the Satellites were very well sought after by many of my clientele.
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The Tecra was the professional line. It was better, but it was the most complex of all the laptops I've ever worked on past or present. Those things had tons of screws in them. Your AC adapter was built in so they just had a figure eight type power cord externally and that was it. No brick.
 
Dan_D said:
The Tecra was the professional line. It was better, but it was the most complex of all the laptops I've ever worked on past or present. Those things had tons of screws in them. Your AC adapter was built in so they just had a figure eight type power cord externally and that was it. No brick.
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I never had to deal with any of those, thank god.
 
Parts of Toshiba will probably be liquidated or sold off, closed down, etc. It will still exist as a company, just in private hands, and maybe this is a good thing to make them leaner and meaner. I hope they can emerge from this a stronger company.

With regards to their electronics, there aren't many Toshiba items in my household... The only things really left are a couple of mechanical hard drives, along with an older 40" LCD TV that I bought back in around 2008, before Circuit City closed down for good. The hard drives and the TV are still working great to this date. The Toshiba Blu Ray player that I bought back in 2012 bit the dust in 2017.

On another note, I still have one Toshiba device in operation in my lab. There's a really old, indestructible workstation running Red Hat Linux that has a SCSI Toshiba DVD-ROM drive in it. I still use it mostly for one specific program (SPSCAN) when it comes to doing some analysis with my NMR data once in a long, long while. I built it back in 2002 when I started my job, and that DVD-ROM drive actually works very well, even playing movie DVD's without any stuttering. That's pretty darn good considering that it's an old Athlon XP 1800+ in that system.
 
CAD4466HK said:
I never had to deal with any of those, thank god.
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The Tecra was generally a better quality and better built unit. I didn't have to work on nearly as many of them as I did the Satellites. In fact, the Tecra was the unit I worked on the least. In my opinion, it was the best built unit available at the time with only the IBM Thinkpad's being remotely in the same league. However, the Thinkpad's also fucking sucked because they can sometimes have radically different designs even within the same model range and series. No other laptops I've ever worked on were built that way. If you knew one Presario laptop you kind of knew them all within that series. If you worked on one Tecra, you could work on them all and so on.
 
Quite a coincidence that I've bought a samsung screen to replace my toshiba TV in the kitchen on the same day this news came out.
 
Well, it sounds like Toshiba is just being brought private, not killed, so an obituary may be premature, but still, I'll bite and post my favorite (and probably only) Toshiba memories.

First PCs I used (after I started out on my various friends Commodore 64's) were my parents Toshiba laptops.

We are talking late 1980's early 1990's some time.

My mom had a Toshiba 3100 series "laptop" with an orange monochrome gas plasma screen. I think I remember it being a 386, but I am not sure:

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My dad had a Toshiba T1000LE with a blue and white monochome screen:

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I believe this bad boy despite being a few years newer than the 386 above, was actually an 8086.


Despite having an 8bit Nintendo since ~1987, I was immediately drawn to these things. I used to play DOS games on them and dream of having a color display :p


It was after I accidentally formatted my moms C: drive in ~1990-1991 some time they decided I had an interest in this stuff and to support it, but without putting their data at risk. Christmas 1991 I got a 286 desktop. Yes, I was a very privileged kid, not too many kids had their home PC's in 1991. My parents were not wealthy, and I had three younger siblings, but they were always willing to spend money on things they thought supported learning.

Also remember that 1991 was the year the 486 came out. My 286 was assembled from spare parts by a local PC recycler, and it was one of those Christmas + Birthday + All of my allowance that year type of gift. If memory serves, I even had to sign a contract with my parents to that extent (so if I later complained, they could fish it out and point to it. I never complained, I was thrilled)

1703276550995.png


It's a shit picture, I know, but we didn't exactly all have good good cameras in our pockets back then.

It was an 8Mhz 286 with a 5.25" HD floppy drive, a 20MB hard drive, a 256k VGA card, a 13" (I think?) Hyundai VGA monitor and 1MB of Ram (640k base, 384k high)

Few weeks after I got it I had it completely disassembled on the floor. My mom freaked, but I put it back together again, and it worked just fine.

And the rest - as they say - is history.


So, while Toshiba's are by no means my favorite machines ever, they do hold a special place in my heart, as they are what got me started on this lifelong journey.
 
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Zarathustra[H] said:
Well, it sounds like Toshiba is just being brought private, not killed, so an obituary may be premature,
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Indeed. This isn't unheard of in the business world as going private allows the company to do what its leadership wants to instead of being ruled by a committee of the top shareholders. There are obvious pros and cons to running a company either way but I don't take this as Toshiba's death. It may still die off but if anything this may give it the best chance to succeed in the long run.
 
Well REJOICE! For Tis the Season! This just means they'll sell off the branding, and then we can ALL look forward to ALL the new Toshiba-branded generic 50" TV's and Chromebooks hitting Walmart in a year or two's time......right next to the ones from Westinghouse, Gateway 2000 and Packard Bell......gotta be a Packard Bell refresh out there...gotta be......
 
Oh my, Packlard bell, the predecessor to the early Dell clusterfluke of rushed to market, mass-produced, POS peeweecee's, hahahaha...ah... those were the dayz :D
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Well, it sounds like Toshiba is just being brought private, not killed, so an obituary may be premature, but still, I'll bite and post my favorite (and probably only) Toshiba memories.
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Exactly. They're still around, just like X/Twitter.

Fukushima didn't help them, but they still have over 100,000 employees and are pulling in tens of billions of dollars annually.

Zarathustra[H] said:
It was after I accidentally formatted my moms C: drive in ~1990-1991 some time they decided I had an interest in this stuff and to support it, but without putting their data at risk. Christmas 1991 I got a 286 desktop. Yes, I was a very privileged kid, not too many kids had their home PC's in 1991. My parents were not wealthy, and I had three younger siblings, but they were always willing to spend money on things they thought supported learning.

Also remember that 1991 was the year the 486 came out. My 286 was assembled from spare parts by a local PC recycler, and it was one of those Christmas + Birthday + All of my allowance that year type of gift. If memory serves, I even had to sign a contract with my parents to that extent (so if I later complained, they could fish it out and point to it. I never complained, I was thrilled)
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Cool story, bro. You have a better memory than me... and you actually had a camera! Disposable?
I messed around with my dad's 386, but he finally got tired of me monopolizing it and bought me a 286 around the same time as you. ;)
To keep this thread semi-on topic, I do remember one of them had a 3.5" Toshiba floppy disk drive, which was actually quiet compared to the other one.
IIRC I also once owned a 2.5" Toshiba hard drive, which was slow, but quiet. They bought OCZ, so I technically owned a power supply from them there.
 
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dogDAbone said:
Oh my, Packlard bell, the predecessor to the early Dell clusterfluke of rushed to market, mass-produced, POS peeweecee's, hahahaha...ah... those were the dayz :D
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I worked in the computer section of a regional Best-Buy type of store in the early 90's, so we sold a lot of Packard Bell and such.....this was before 3D cards and the only upsells were a Soundblaster card (or an AdLib if you wanted to be cheap about it) or maybe moving from an EGA to a VGA card...actually VGA sold itself......old days INDEED....

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HeadRusch said:
I worked in the computer section of a regional Best-Buy type of store in the early 90's, so we sold a lot of Packard Bell and such.....this was before 3D cards and the only upsells were a Soundblaster card (or an AdLib if you wanted to be cheap about it) or maybe moving from an EGA to a VGA card...actually VGA sold itself......old days INDEED....

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So did I, and although we sold a lot of Packturd Quells, we had more returns on them than all of the other 7 brands of pc's we sold combined !


And just like the Compcraq's of that era, there was no way to repair the bad ones that came back either, since they made xxx number of each model, then switched their production lines to the next model, WITHOUT any stock of spare parts for the previous runs.... therefore we had 2 choices available to us:

A) Take the PB's back in exchange for another brand with similar specs, with perhaps some mild up-selling in the process (1st choice, since we would at least get some return allowance for from PB) OR
B) Issue a refund & let the customer go somewhere else (last resort, no credit, only a small salvage value & then dumpstered them...

Both of which led me to have a considerable home inventory of PB parts that I thought somebody would want but never did :D
 
My first flat screen TV was a Toshiba 1080P 47", bought back in the early 2000's. Grew up with Toshiba CRT's. I have a couple Toshiba HDD's and have been great.
 
The only thing I remember having was a 1.5TB external HDD from Radio Shack I gutted to put in a HDD ODD caddy for my HP laptop a decade ago.
Had to get a new caddy that had a thin sheet metal base to fit the 12.5mm height drive. Was nice have 2.5TB since I rarely used the ODD.
 
dogDAbone said:
So did I, and although we sold a lot of Packturd Quells, we had more returns on them than all of the other 7 brands of pc's we sold combined !


And just like the Compcraq's of that era, there was no way to repair the bad ones that came back either, since they made xxx number of each model, then switched their production lines to the next model, WITHOUT any stock of spare parts for the previous runs.... therefore we had 2 choices available to us:

A) Take the PB's back in exchange for another brand with similar specs, with perhaps some mild up-selling in the process (1st choice, since we would at least get some return allowance for from PB) OR
B) Issue a refund & let the customer go somewhere else (last resort, no credit, only a small salvage value & then dumpstered them...

Both of which led me to have a considerable home inventory of PB parts that I thought somebody would want but never did :D
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My dad purchased a PB desktop with one of those new fangled 60 MHz Pentiums. That thing lasted in our household for a good 8 years before he replaced it. The only thing that sucked for a young Armenius growing up and getting into PC gaming with this machine was no support for the emerging 3D graphics accelerators.
 
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