1988- Toshiba T1000 (5/2024)

Object/Artifact

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VintageComputer.Gallery

Name/Title

1988- Toshiba T1000 (5/2024)

Tags

Toshiba

Description

The Toshiba T1000 (list price: $ 1,199 in 1988) was (and is) a solidly-built, reliable, reasonably lightweight (6.4-pound) laptop computer with a great keyboard but not too much else to recommend it. Like last month’s featured diskless wonder, the DEC VT180 ("Robin"), the Toshiba machine also made it off the engineering drawing boards and into production (somehow) without a hard disk. While the Robin managed this trick with four (count ‘em) floppy disk drives and built-in terminal emulation firmware, the T1000 pulls it off with just a single 3.5-inch 720KB diskette drive (an external 5.25" floppy drive was a factory option) – and some technological trickery. The first trick is that the Toshiba’s operating system, genuine Microsoft MS-DOS V2.11, is built right into the system’s firmware. That’s right: DOS on a chip. So forget upgrades and step-ups and startup floppy disks and what-have-you. This machine runs MS-DOS V2.11 straight from silicon, and will likely ALWAYS run DOS 2.11 straight from silicon, unless you want to boot a later DOS version from a floppy (SLOW), or unless somebody, somewhere hot rods the machine somehow with a custom DOS chip. It sure won’t be me.

Acquisition

Acquisition Method

EBay

Date

Mar 15, 2007

Web Links and URLs

#17 Greatest PC of all time

General Notes

Note

Remember, the T1000 has a fully-functional parallel port in the back, which means you can plug in a full-size portable "backpack" hard disk from companies such as MicroSolutions. But that would change the fundamental nature of the machine – and defeat the purpose of this article. We’re talking sow’s ears here, remember, not silk purses. So, with MS-DOS V2.11 on a chip, the T1000 gives you reasonably fast boot-ups (actually, the system memory test is painfully slow, but it can be turned off in CMOS setup, or bypassed by pressing the space bar during startup), and when you’re done, you’re actually staring at a real MS-DOS C:\ prompt! Most of the familiar, basic DOS functions and utilities (copy, format, delete) are there, but forget "memmaker" or "defrag" or "scandisk" or "drivespace" or any of the newer stuff. So how can you run any programs on this machine, equipped as it is with just one floppy drive and no hard disk? After all, you can’t "write" files to Drive C, because C: is the DOS Chip, and it’s a read-only "drive." Well, there’s a tricky little feature on the T1000 that lets you store customized copies of your "Autoexec.bat" and Config.sys" files in a small section of base system RAM, since the standard Autoexec.bat and Config.sys" files that come on the chip are "hard-wired" and can not be modified.