posted by
martyb
on Tuesday August 11 2020, @02:13AM
from the to-shiba-or-not-to-shiba?-now-we-know dept.
from the to-shiba-or-not-to-shiba?-now-we-know dept.
BBC:
The Japanese giant Toshiba has sold its final stake in the personal computer maker Dynabook.
It means the firm no longer has a connection with making PCs or laptops.
Sharp bought 80% of Toshiba's personal computing arm in 2018 for $36m (£27m), and has now bought the remaining shares, Toshiba said in a statement.
Toshiba's first laptop, the T1100, launched in 1985. It weighed 4kg (8.8 pounds) and worked with 3.5 inch (8.8cm) floppy disks.
How much will Toshiba's departure from the laptop market be mourned?
Additional Coverage:
Toshiba is officially out of the laptop business
Goodbye Toshiba Laptops. It's Been Good Knowing Ya
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Toshiba Shuts the Lid on Laptops After 35 Years
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 11 2020, @02:34AM (6 children)
Finally - since 1991 Toshiba has been screwing up my life with their custom solutions to everything in their laptop systems. Oh, you expect COM1 to be at this address? Well, we don't really have a COM1, what we have is COM7, 8, and 9 at these addresses which we map back to COM1 through this proprietary connection that incidentally sends your serial port reading code all screwy - you'll need a special configuration to set the address for our laptops - no other PCs or laptops anywhere in the world, just Toshiba.
The same general theme continued even through the early 2010s I was seeing "custom" things that meant that code that ran everywhere else would stumble on Toshiba laptops.
I like to continue to remember and point out that Toshiba also leaked silent submarine propeller tech to the Russians during the height of the Cold war - no small shift in the balance of power at the time, and on a much more personally affecting note: sold me a crappy cassette player which died within 9 months and had the most annoying factory service protocol I have ever encountered - which basically amounted to 4 trips to the tech shop only to finally be given the dead player back with a shrug and no further satisfaction under warranty.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:12AM
We had one Toshiba laptop at my last company.
I can't remember why we only had one, or what was wrong with it, but even though I eventually managed to pump it full of RAM (maybe 2 GBs?)* in an effort to get someone to take it off my hands, everytime I gave it to an user they complained about it and it came back.
I have a funny feeling it might have had a proper 1920 x 1080 screen too. Still was universally hated.
* This would be 2006 maybe.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:10AM (4 children)
I think the only Toshiba laptop I've ever dealt with was a friend's wife's Satellite. I mostly remember that the cheesy plastic hinges had broken. It ran Vista, and I don't remember what other problems she had.
> ...Toshiba also leaked silent submarine propeller tech to the Russians...
I remember that well. I remember some politicians did a publicity stunt where they smashed some Toshiba products with sledgehammers. They should have smashed each other for allowing Toshiba access to such critical information in the first place.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:15AM (1 child)
Those custom implementation were generally supporting "special features" that mainstream laptops didn't have. Doctors loved the Toshiba laptops because they ticked off some boxes on a feature list that others didn't - nevermind that those extra features were useless... they had them, so they must have been better, right?
Doctors are universally some of the dumbest smart people I know.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:28AM
Sounds like Apple products.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday August 11 2020, @07:01PM (1 child)
What a coincidence my Toshiba Satellite also had broken hinges. They broke rather quickly, actually.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:37AM
I was considering epoxying a cabinet hinge onto the thing for the win but friend's wife didn't like the idea. She'd rather prop it up with something.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sulla on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:40AM (1 child)
At the beginning of the pandemic my wife and i decided to set up a media room so we could play some video games together. BestBuy had a deal on Toshiba 50" LCDs so we bought two of them.
You have to have a remote to do anything. The toshiba has a single button that doesnt actually do anything. Cant change volume, input source, anything. The damn thing always starts up to some bullshit smart screen and even when you set it to always turn on to a single source it reverts back after three days to the bullshit smart screen.
I dont ever return anything, so I'll be living with this and hating toshiba anytime i see it. I will never buy another one of their products and i would never suggest their products to anybody, not even aristarchus or warmonkey.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @02:40AM
Buy at least 1 extra remote (if you haven't already), and / or a universal / multi-device one.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:49AM (1 child)
Around 1997 or so when I was back in college my mother gave me as a gift a Toshiba Libretto. It was a damn small laptop but packed a lot of punch for the time nevertheless. It was about the size of a VHS cassette and weighed about as much but had an 800×600 screen, a Pentium processor, and 64 megs of RAM, which was pretty damn good for the time. I even managed to dual boot it with Red Hat 6, which involved bootstrapping the install over ZIP disks since it didn't have an easy way to boot off of CD-ROM. No USB at the time! I did my undergraduate thesis on it, which involved programming a MC68HC11 microcontroller. It was the smallest but still full-blown machine that I ever owned. Despite its small size (yes, a VHS cassette!) I didn't find it too difficult to type on. Too bad that I tripped on the power cord one morning a year later when I woke up, so it flew off the table and smashed into pieces. ☹ Served me well for four years though.
Around 2008 I got a Toshiba Satellite which seemed to be a solid piece of gear, but I was robbed after I had it for less than a year. That laptop bag which was stolen from me also contained the title of a condominium unit I was going through the mortgage process at the time. That was a huge headache: I had to go to court to have that reissued and the process wound up in limbo for several months while I had to pay through the nose with interest on what should have been a short-term bridge loan until the mortgage was finalised.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by nostyle on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:54AM
The libretto was a rather nice piece of kit. I bought two when they were dumping them (the earliest version) for around $500 around '97. It had no fan, so the only sound it made was the nearly inaudible whir and click of the hard drive. IIRC it came with W95, so I set up one to dual boot with Slackware, then later managed to get WinNT to run on the other one. It was great to have these little critters to do multi-platform tests on. Then my wife started a business, and the NT unit became her partner's PC with a full-size keyboard and video display hanging off of it, while the Slackware unit served as the business' print/file/db server and firewall. Fast forward a few years (the partner was gone), and the NT unit got a fresh install of openBSD and served as our home NAT/firewall until about 2010. The only maintenance I ever did was an upgrade of the hard drives early on. When operating as firewalls, the units were on 24/7 with typical uptimes measured in years.
Nowadays, between USB, HDMI, WIFI, Bluetooth, ... etc., the librettos are simply unsuited to the current computing environment, and I sent them to the recycle a few years back. They have been replaced by a pair of fanless low-end ARM chromebooks - one running the original OS (our "guest" laptop), and one with a Slackware install where I do all my LaTeX projects.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:09AM (3 children)
My very first x86 computer was a Toshiba Satellite Pro 405cs with a Pentium 1@75Mhz, 40MB of RAM, and a 750MB hard disk. I got it at a Savers thrift store for $15 when I was 12, and it came with Windows 95, though it clearly shipped with Windows 3.1. This was around 2006-2007, so it was already hopelessly dated by that point.
I still have that machine, it's covered in black duct tape for "protection" (genius 13 year old me), and runs a custom 2014 Linux distro I compiled by hand from source tarballs.
I love that machine, always have, simply because of the nostalgia. Never tried any serious programming on it, and due to its lack of USB, my childhood poverty, and the kernel drivers for its PCMCIA controller being removed from the source tree, has *never* been on the internet at any point in time.
The original battery still holds a good bit of a charge after all these years.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:08AM (1 child)
Your sig made me chuckle.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Subsentient on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:28AM
"Enlightenment cannot be attained until the fourth eye is wide open" -Goa Tse
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:26PM
My first computer was a well used and abused laptop i bought from a liquor drunk co worker for $100. He used to accidentally step on it and spill whiskey on it. Luckily he was a very emaciated man so did not completely smush it. That laptop lasted many years through all kinds of trials and tribulations. I was so impressed when i saved up enough money i bought another toshiba and it was very well built as well. It went to a relative for a few years after i got done with it and then i sold it on ebay to another person who paid good money for it, because they had the same laptop and wanted another one because theirs was so good. After that, quality started slipping until the last few years the ones i saw were pretty shittastic.