Toshiba used to be the king of laptops during the 80s-90s. I particularly liked the T3200 with its plasma display. However, there were few other cool laptops in Toshiba’s lineup. I was personally impressed by the T1000 introduced in 1987, 30 years ago. It was a really small system and weighed a tad less than 3 kg! The advertisement in the press was pretty effective, picturing the system at scale, fitting in a double page. Today, I’ve played with my T1200, also introduced in 1987. Sure, it is bigger and heavier than the T1000, but it is still a remarkable machine.

It is a classic system for the era: powered by an Intel 80C86 processor (paced @ 4.77 MHz or 9.54 MHz – user selectable via a switch), has 1 MB of RAM (640 MB usable by MS-DOS 3.30, and 384 as a RAM drive). The LCD display has a pretty good quality (640×200 pixels, 80 x 25 characters) with a correct backlight. On the storage side, the T1200 has a 720 kB 3.5″ floppy drive and a 20 MB hard drive, both internal. Everything works well on my model except the HDD. Too bad, because it is a custom model designed for Toshiba and manufactured by JVC (Victor Company of Japan). It will be hard to replace! It is interesting that part of the RAM was powered by its dedicated battery and could be used as a small persistent storage. There are many pictures attached to this post, so if you are interested to have a peek inside the beast, you may want to click on the first picture and then scroll thru them. Have a great WE!

 

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