I had a Toshiba Chromebook for a little while and it was fantastic, a machine focused around meeting all the hardware needs to be “good enough” at a reasonable price. It had a great 1080p display, good performance, a good keyboard and great build. All under $300. Oh well. Such is life.
My first developer laptop was one of these hacked to run Ubuntu. I think I dropped $400 on it. That puppy took me from barista to employed software developer.
Afterwards it found a second life as my favorite travel / bedside laptop until a glass of water claimed its life a few years back.
It's a valid question though. So many of my colleagues in software engineering want to be baristas, or bake bread, or grow organic marijuana! But I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
Living without the social stigma associated with IT work (at least in western countries) is also an incentive. So many times I have seen faces changing when I say that I work as a SD. It's a real attraction killer. I even once had a lady who wouldn't believe me because I was "too cool" to do this job.
Being in the service industry isn't great either. I was blown off many a time when the person I was otherwise hitting it off with found out I was a barista. I have literally been laughed at. I have a lot of pent up trauma about it.
I was a barista at a pretty successful shop, where we did a LOT of business. It could be fairly back breaking work at times. Despite winning a few awards (excuse the brag), I don't think I ever made more than $44,000 a year in a high cost of living metro.
But yea, being young, working with my hands, and having significantly less after work mental baggage was all awesome.
Doing painful physical labor 40 hours a week, but barely being able to afford rent and having no sick days or health care makes it a pretty poor trade in the big picture.
There really are two Americas, and having lived in both, it is much better in the bubble than on the outside.
Everyone is different so ymmv, but that is my experience.
Agreed, the Toshiba Chromebook 2 is nice, 4GB RAM, good keyboard, beautiful screen. But the web has become so slow and bloated, it's not very usable anymore. It now works as dedicated recipe terminal in the kitchen. It is still getting ChromeOS updates, until next year I think.
How well does it do at that job? I've found that recipe websites are some of the most bloated and least performant, up there with network-affiliate-branded news sites.
I still rock a TCB 2 - the earlier version with only 2GB RAM. I still find it eminently usable and often have 10+ tabs open(1). It hasn't missed a beat since May 2015 although perhaps recently I've started noticing a bit of slowness here and there but nothing major. I'm still using it every day as a bedside laptop; I'll be very sorry to let it go when the time comes.
(1) I use it primarily for light browsing, email and YouTube, so it doesn't do any heavy lifting.
Two of my children are still using these. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 is available (swappa.com, eBay, etc.) in 2014 or 2015 versions. The major difference seems to be that the 2015 has backlit keys and is very rare compared to the 2014.
I bought protective shells for them and that made a huge difference in longevity. The kids would tend to pick up their computers by the top/screen and could crack the screen or knock a connector loose.
The speakers on it are also decent, which my kids appreciate.
I really don't see how people can use the typical Chromebook with its 1366 x 768 screen except that it would make you focus solely on what was on screen.
My first laptop for college was a Toshiba Satellite. This would have been around 2006. It was a great machine at a reasonable price. Never had any issues with it until the battery died like 8 years later.
Tecra 500CDT for me. Dual booted Windows largely for DOS gaming, and Debian.
But what I really wanted (and still occasionally look up on eBay) was one of the tiny Librettos. Never took the dive though and as the years passed the spec became harder and harder to justify.
I had a Tecra 500CS in high school. Used to carry it in my bookbag, no case or anything. It was an absolute beast, and the first machine I ever installed Linux on - Slackware 3.4, via floppy disk sets because I couldn't afford a CD drive on top of the machine itself, which even used cost me an entire summer job's proceeds. It did have a built-in modem, though, and that sure was handy.
I suppose I shouldn't talk of it in the past tense. After all, I still have it, and it still works after all these years.
I'm pretty sure I didn't yet know Debian existed. Also, my mom would've been pissed at me tying up the phone line that long. Disks I could download piecemeal, one or two a night, while I was staying up far longer than I should to get on the MUCKs while the west coast folks were around.
I worked in tech support for Winbook laptops from ~94-96 at their call center in Columbus. We had a small crew of engineers there as well and we'd regularly buy Toshibas and tear them apart just to check out the competition. They were definitely the gold standard.
Also got a job offer to work at McMurdo Station on the south pole after getting them up and running on a few laptops. Never took it due to some matrimonial commitments, but did get a cool hat and pin out of the deal.
Good times. (It's Doogie if anybody that worked then is in here)
Haha. My first ever non-antique laptop was a Toshiba Satellite Pro circa 2000. Bought it from some dodgy central Eurasian fellows out of the back of a car. One of said fellows is apparently now running some major blockchain thought leader scammery. People don't change their colours.
Prior to that I acquired this guy donated through the local 2600 chapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-psu.jpg and submitted an nmap fingerprint for its DOS-based, parallel-port driven TCP/IP stack! Good times.
One of the oddities of China where I've been for ~20 years is that rar is still super popular. Never figured that one out. I guess the warez OS images bundled it years ago and it became a thing for 1.4 billion people. How's that for a marketing channel?
I hacked my way through college on a Toshiba Tecra 750... $7,500 configuration that I was able to get for $900! Probably the best laptop I owned except for my current 2015 MacBook Pro.
My aunt got one and I helped her set it up and install software on it. These things were so cool at the time. It even had a built-in 3.5" floppy drive. I think it had a trackball and buttons instead of the touchpads we're all used to now.
I installed Debian Jessie on my 320CDT just a week or two ago. That's the last version of Debian that supports the Pentium MMX CPU. The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore and the screen is pretty dim.
The 320CDT came with Windows 95 but I got a $200 or so Toshiba store credit in a class action settlement because of a floppy drive problem with the 320CDT that I never actually experienced. I used that to buy Windows 2000 which ran reasonably well on the 96MB of RAM I have in the 320CDT.
My next laptop was a Satellite Pro 6100 which was a truly awful piece of hardware... got sent in for repairs multiple times and never worked right.
Wait. They sold the business to sharp, which renamed it Dynabook. so this isn't entirely new. (Sharp just recently acquired the remaining 19% of Toshiba's notebook company it didn't already own.)
NEC and Fujitsu was famost PC manufacturer in Japan but they are acquired by Lenovo (partially). But they are still building some PCs (mainly Laptop) in Japan and selling. I don't know whether they are exported. Some ThinkPads are also made on NEC fabs in Japan.
I had a Toshiba laptop that weighed 80 pounds, a quarter of that was the power adapter and an external drive. The backpack I carried it in could fit a folded yurt. It permanently altered my gait. Good times.
The Toshiba T1000 was the first portable computer I ever used, touched, or saw. It was a miracle: LCD screen, battery power, real keyboard. It felt like something snatched from a time traveler. (Except it booted from MS-DOS 2.1 hard-coded in ROM. I had to boot DOS 3.2 from a floppy.)
Most of them still are iconic. Those things are nigh on indestructible and unless you really mean it they will be happy to continue to exist for a very long time. I wonder how recyclers deal with Toughbooks.
Can somebody expound a little more on what the fraud was?
Edit: I believe the tweet is referring to the 2015 accounting scandal (listed on wikipedia here[0]), more information on how it happened here[1].
From what I understand, the oscillations come from the fact that corporate leadership handed down profit targets for business unit presidents to meet, with the expectation that failure to meet them = you're fired. So the business unit presidents worked with accountants to fudge the numbers at the end of every quarter to meet the unrealistic targets. Then the numbers would revert back to reality at the start of the next quarter. Corporate leadership was only looking at end-of-quarter numbers so they just kept increasing the (already unrealistic) profit targets year after year? Or maybe they understood what was going on but liked the effect it was having on their stock options/bonuses/whatever, so they kept perpetuating the fraud? But then again, why allow profits to revert back to reality, why not fudge profits all the way to hide the oscillations?
My vote is on corporate leadership incompetence. When you have a dictatorship-like culture of strict obedience, you start having an information propagation problem. Your underlings will suppress information they know you won't like (because you'll punish them) and will only feed you the truth when convenient. They will also outright lie if they have to, to save themselves from your wrath.
Yes, but where can we find a graph and explanation similar to that twitter post? Google Translate isn't really getting the implications across clearly for me.
Obviously Profit can't exceed Revenue, but how did they do this?
> It appears there were paper tradings at Toshiba subsidiary “Toshiba IT Services” which reminds me the legendary Toshiba accounting fraud. The legendary one that the waves compounded from excess manipulation, to the point that the operational profit surpassed sales figures.
The tweet I quoted was about a newly discovered incident but the chart is from 2015. Sorry but that was the best link I could find at that time.
In that instance at P.C. sales in 2008-2015, IIRC, the employees were forced to “do challenges” to meet the predetermined goals by the end of fiscal year(31st March in Japan). But the target wasn’t realistic and “challenges” became a synonym for various manipulation inside the corporate, from relabeling future sales to forging documents. That led to yearly pulse right at the end of FY and scheduled YoY growth on paper.
I believe they had to have some internal consistencies and they couldn’t just fabricate all of it.
So future contracts projected into the figures at present had to stay at that point in time in case they materialize later. That led to sharp decline after the numbers for one term was finalized.
> Investigators describe how Toshiba's corporate leadership handed down strict profit targets, known as Challenges, to business unit presidents, often with the implication that failure would not be accepted. In some cases, quarterly Challenges were handed down near the end of the quarter when there was no time left to materially affect unit performance. It soon became clear within individual business units that the only way to achieve these Challenges was to do so through the use of irregular accounting techniques.
So impossible targets set late. You basically tell them "be fired or cheat". Then the corporate culture, or maybe Japanese work culture, means no communication that the impossible is being asked. So, save your skin.
I wonder if big Japanese companies are doing more internal auditing, as a result of the recent fiasco with Nissan and Ghosn that saw Ghosn's ouster and arrest and subsequent escape.
The most impressive laptop I ever owned was a Libretto. It was more than a decade before another laptop came around that gave that same feeling (the Macbook Air).
Libretto 30 owner clocking in. It was amazing to have a portable device that fit in a "poacher" pocket and could browse the web and play mp3 files in 1998.
Toshiba Portege, at about 1.1kg IIRC, was pretty incredible, around the time the Macbook Air first came out, lighter than the Air but with a DVD drive. It was my travel work laptop, before netbooks became a thing.
It felt quite plastic though, nothing like a Macbook Air (which I got pretty soon after). Mechanical drive too, I seem to recall - I still have it upstairs and have it pencilled in as a first Linux laptop for my son.
The Libretto! I had completely forgotten about my Libretto 100, which I carried with me to class and took notes on, as well as used in the field to debug HW issues, using the small dock and connecting field HW to the serial port. I took that quirky little laptop all over the world with me in my travels. It was thick and sturdy, so I wasn't too concerned about protecting it, as opposed to the ultraportable laptops nowadays, which are so thin and wide that I have to mind what happens to it. There was also a small and friendly community of Libretto owners which would share tips; I recall disassembling the laptop and soldering on more memory, based on some guides from people in the Libretto mailing list.
Funny. The first laptop I saw was my dad's clunky old Portege (from the '90s?). Tried to bring it back to life the other day but it looks like the disk is dead and I didn't care _that_ much.
At least personally, I always considered Toshiba laptops to be the bottom of the barrel in terms of quality. I don't recall a time when thinkpad (at least before Lenovo bought them) could have been considered inferior?
They were quite good in the early to mid 90's but by 2000 and onward they were pretty bad as far as quality. I worked in a computer store that did also did repair and there were a few problems you'd always see on Toshibas: power button failure (ribbon cable on the inside would get damaged or just come loose) and power connector failures (the barrel connector would come unsoldered on the inside).
My first laptop was a Toshiba around 2003. It was pretty great at the time, but laughably heavy and clunky by today’s standards (I still have it for some reason...)
I remember Toshiba AC100 back in 2011 (afair) with tegra cpu and 3G modem weighting about 800 grams. Originally shipped with Android without marketplace, became more or less usable after installing Ubuntu on it.
They really could win a niche of ultraportable laptops.
My father had a computer store that sold Taiwanese desktop clones and Toshiba laptops in the late 80s. The article says that Toshiba were manufacturing laptops from 1985. I'm pretty sure we were selling them in 1987 so I didn't realise quite how close to the start we were. They were very good laptops at the time - their only real competitor was the Compaq laptop range and I'd argue that the Toshibas were better, although I'm obviously biased.
Just looking now at wikipedia, I'm sure that we sold the T1000 [1] and T1200 [2] but I'm not sure if we ever sold the T1100 [3] (their first model). We also sold the T3100 [4] which had a gas plasma screen that was quite a wondrous thing at the time. It was also very expensive. They were mostly bought by higher level executives as a status symbol. My father kept one for personal use too.
It was a very profitable business to be in at the time - margins were high, unlike the razor-thin margins of today. But my dad didn't capitalise on it as well as he should have. He overpaid his sales staff when they really weren't having to make much of an effort to sell such a hot item. And he didn't pay enough attention to the accounts so that when the recession of the early 90s arrived and government departments stopped buying he hit a cashflow problem and the company went bust. But there were a few good years before that and I still remember the Toshiba laptops of that time quite fondly.
Part of Toshiba was banned from selling into the US for two years at the end of the 80's for selling machines to the USSR which were used to make quiet propellers for submarines. https://apnews.com/aad45a6f2de8d599d97242394be65923
This response by the US would have hurt both Japan and the US, while not so much affecting the USSR who already had their quiet propellers. It probably did hurt US consumers, but it didn't end up hurting the US government which ignored its own ban! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/12/15/t...
162 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadAfterwards it found a second life as my favorite travel / bedside laptop until a glass of water claimed its life a few years back.
It takes a certain kind of person, and I'm part of that group ;-)
But I like talking to people and enjoyed interacting with customers and regulars.
But yea, being young, working with my hands, and having significantly less after work mental baggage was all awesome.
Doing painful physical labor 40 hours a week, but barely being able to afford rent and having no sick days or health care makes it a pretty poor trade in the big picture.
There really are two Americas, and having lived in both, it is much better in the bubble than on the outside.
Everyone is different so ymmv, but that is my experience.
(1) I use it primarily for light browsing, email and YouTube, so it doesn't do any heavy lifting.
I bought protective shells for them and that made a huge difference in longevity. The kids would tend to pick up their computers by the top/screen and could crack the screen or knock a connector loose.
The speakers on it are also decent, which my kids appreciate.
I really don't see how people can use the typical Chromebook with its 1366 x 768 screen except that it would make you focus solely on what was on screen.
But what I really wanted (and still occasionally look up on eBay) was one of the tiny Librettos. Never took the dive though and as the years passed the spec became harder and harder to justify.
I suppose I shouldn't talk of it in the past tense. After all, I still have it, and it still works after all these years.
Also got a job offer to work at McMurdo Station on the south pole after getting them up and running on a few laptops. Never took it due to some matrimonial commitments, but did get a cool hat and pin out of the deal.
Good times. (It's Doogie if anybody that worked then is in here)
Prior to that I acquired this guy donated through the local 2600 chapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-psu.jpg and submitted an nmap fingerprint for its DOS-based, parallel-port driven TCP/IP stack! Good times.
And... what dodgy things are you currently involved in?? I'm guessing you never paid for your RAR license either. /s
They were the best at the time.
I had a couple of Dells after that but they never felt as robust as the Toshiba.
The 320CDT came with Windows 95 but I got a $200 or so Toshiba store credit in a class action settlement because of a floppy drive problem with the 320CDT that I never actually experienced. I used that to buy Windows 2000 which ran reasonably well on the 96MB of RAM I have in the 320CDT.
My next laptop was a Satellite Pro 6100 which was a truly awful piece of hardware... got sent in for repairs multiple times and never worked right.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3056030/proposed-toshiba-fuj...
Looks like the answer is 4 years.
The last time I was in Yodobashi Camera, I had a hard time finding any electronics that were actually made in Japan. I even asked the staff about it.
Darker blue is operational profit and lighter blue is sales total in ¥100mil.(~$mil.)
Just like an oscillating power circuitry! Can’t make this up and they couldn’t have been more engineering oriented than this.
Edit: I believe the tweet is referring to the 2015 accounting scandal (listed on wikipedia here[0]), more information on how it happened here[1].
From what I understand, the oscillations come from the fact that corporate leadership handed down profit targets for business unit presidents to meet, with the expectation that failure to meet them = you're fired. So the business unit presidents worked with accountants to fudge the numbers at the end of every quarter to meet the unrealistic targets. Then the numbers would revert back to reality at the start of the next quarter. Corporate leadership was only looking at end-of-quarter numbers so they just kept increasing the (already unrealistic) profit targets year after year? Or maybe they understood what was going on but liked the effect it was having on their stock options/bonuses/whatever, so they kept perpetuating the fraud? But then again, why allow profits to revert back to reality, why not fudge profits all the way to hide the oscillations?
My vote is on corporate leadership incompetence. When you have a dictatorship-like culture of strict obedience, you start having an information propagation problem. Your underlings will suppress information they know you won't like (because you'll punish them) and will only feed you the truth when convenient. They will also outright lie if they have to, to save themselves from your wrath.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#2015_accounting_scanda...
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshi...
Obviously Profit can't exceed Revenue, but how did they do this?
The tweet I quoted was about a newly discovered incident but the chart is from 2015. Sorry but that was the best link I could find at that time.
In that instance at P.C. sales in 2008-2015, IIRC, the employees were forced to “do challenges” to meet the predetermined goals by the end of fiscal year(31st March in Japan). But the target wasn’t realistic and “challenges” became a synonym for various manipulation inside the corporate, from relabeling future sales to forging documents. That led to yearly pulse right at the end of FY and scheduled YoY growth on paper.
The profit only exceeded the monthly revenue, not the quarter average.
So future contracts projected into the figures at present had to stay at that point in time in case they materialize later. That led to sharp decline after the numbers for one term was finalized.
It's a pity that Wells Fargo has not yet exited the banking business :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...
So impossible targets set late. You basically tell them "be fired or cheat". Then the corporate culture, or maybe Japanese work culture, means no communication that the impossible is being asked. So, save your skin.
Stupid maneuvers all around.
The books were cooked. The profits oscillations in the tweet graph aren't natural, and the peaks were inncreasing.
At one point the profits were even greater that revenues.
That was the first computer I owned that earned itself back inside of a month.
It couldn't do both at the same time.
It felt quite plastic though, nothing like a Macbook Air (which I got pretty soon after). Mechanical drive too, I seem to recall - I still have it upstairs and have it pencilled in as a first Linux laptop for my son.
Then IBM became king with the ThinkPad.
RIP
They really could win a niche of ultraportable laptops.
I remember the fun I had playing games, learning to program in basic, and writing reports with WordPerfect 4.2.
Toshiba had potential.
Just looking now at wikipedia, I'm sure that we sold the T1000 [1] and T1200 [2] but I'm not sure if we ever sold the T1100 [3] (their first model). We also sold the T3100 [4] which had a gas plasma screen that was quite a wondrous thing at the time. It was also very expensive. They were mostly bought by higher level executives as a status symbol. My father kept one for personal use too.
It was a very profitable business to be in at the time - margins were high, unlike the razor-thin margins of today. But my dad didn't capitalise on it as well as he should have. He overpaid his sales staff when they really weren't having to make much of an effort to sell such a hot item. And he didn't pay enough attention to the accounts so that when the recession of the early 90s arrived and government departments stopped buying he hit a cashflow problem and the company went bust. But there were a few good years before that and I still remember the Toshiba laptops of that time quite fondly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1000
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1200
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100
This response by the US would have hurt both Japan and the US, while not so much affecting the USSR who already had their quiet propellers. It probably did hurt US consumers, but it didn't end up hurting the US government which ignored its own ban! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/12/15/t...